Resource allocation and path planning for RSMA-enabled UAV-VLC networks considering UAV jitter

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted visible light communication (VLC) plays an essential role in night communication and lighting. Nevertheless, the restricted payload capacity of UAVs, coupled with user demands for high communication quality, brings new challenges to UAV communication. This research explores a rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA)-enabled UAV-VLC network considering jittering effects with imperfect channel state information (CSI) and successive interference cancellation (SIC). Then, a multi-objective optimization problem is proposed to minimize energy consumption and maximize the transmission rate. Due to its non-convexity and high computational complexity, the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems: path planning and power allocation. For the path planning problem, a hover point fine-tuning algorithm is proposed considering the field of view (FoV) constraint, and then a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is utilized to obtain an optimized trajectory. For the power allocation problem, linear fractional programming (LFP) and successive convex approximation (SCA) are employed to convert the power allocation issue into a convex one. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in RSMA power allocation and UAV path planning.