Energy Harvesting Schemes for UAV based Communications

Abstract

This paper presents two generic charging and transmission schemes to find the trade-off between the altitude of an Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base station and the acquired harvested energy for maximum coverage area. The first scheme seeks the optimal balance between the coverage area and the harvested energy using simultaneous wireless charging and information transmission (SWCIT). The second scheme proposes time allocation to increase the UAV flying period where multiplexing information transmission and energy harvesting is optimized. Finally, the two schemes are implemented on a real UAV system to verify whether equipping it with energy harvesting technology is practical or not.