Seamless and Energy-efficient Maritime Coverage in Rechargeable UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could be used to establish wireless networks in maritime activities. This paper investigates seamless and energy-efficient coverage strategies for rechargeable UAV networks deployed at sea. Multiple maritime user equipment (MUE) distributed at sea. Rechargeable UAV for-mations depart from the shipboard charging station in sequence, circulating to provide communication services for maritime user equipment. We aim to achieve seamless and energy-efficient coverage by optimizing UAV deployment strategies and path planning. We first modeled a deterministic radio wave propagation in an ocean scenario using the finite difference time domain method(FDTD) to generate an air-to-sea path loss dataset, and an energy efficiency-based objective function is proposed on this basis. Secondly, the problem is solved in two steps, and a joint optimization iterative algorithm based on the sine cosine algorithm(SCA) is proposed to solve it. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optimization algorithm outperforms the comparison algorithms by 14.89% and 56.72%, respectively.