Common Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Interference Channel with Wireless Powered Communications

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled two-user interference channel for wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs). In this system, two UAVs wirelessly charge two low-power Internet-of-things (IoT)-devices on the ground and collect information from them. We consider two scenarios when both UAVs cooperate in energy transmission and/or information reception via interference coordination and coordinated multi-point (CoMP), respectively. For both scenarios, the UAVs’ trajectories are designed to not only enhance the wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency in the downlink, but also mitigate the co-channel interference for wireless information transfer (WIT) in the uplink. In particular, the objective is to maximize the uplink common (minimum) throughput of the two IoT-devices over a finite UAV mission period, by jointly optimizing the trajectories of both UAVs and the downlink/uplink wireless resource allocation, subject to the maximum flying speed and collision avoidance constraints for UAVs, as well as the individual energy neutrality constraints at IoT-devices. Under both scenarios with interference coordination and CoMP, we first obtain the optimal solutions to the two common-rate maximization problems for the special case with sufficiently long UAV mission duration. Next, we obtain high-quality solutions for the practical case with finite UAV mission duration by using the alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that the proposed designs significantly outperform benchmark schemes, and the utilization of CoMP achieves much higher uplink throughput than interference coordination.