Performance Trade-Off in UAV-Aided Wireless-Powered Communication Networks via Multi-Objective Optimization

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication network, where a UAV serves multiple energy constrained wireless sensor nodes (WSNs). In such a network, a UAV transmits wireless power to a group of WSNs which exploits the harvested power to transfer their own information towards the UAV in the uplink. For practical scenarios, a nonlinear energy harvesting saturation model is considered at WSNs. We aim to design resource allocation which maximizes the achievable sum rate in the uplink and minimizes the downlink transmit power simultaneously. The design is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) which optimizes the UAV's 3D position, its transmit power, the time splitting ratio, the uplink transmission time and the beamwidth angle of the UAV. The formulated problem is a non-convex problem which is generally intractable. To address the MOOP, a weighted Tchebycheff method is proposed. The numerical results show a trade-off between the minimum power in the downlink and the maximum rate as well as energy efficiency in the uplink.