A novel radio resource optimization method for relay-based unmanned aerial vehicles

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have attracted worldwide attention in recent years because of their potential applicability in a multitude of fields such as environmental monitoring and the communication provisioning environment. These applications enable data to be remotely collected from distant places through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with communication devices. However, the communication range of a single UAV is limited because of the restrictions of the wireless transceiver as a result of the payload limitation. Therefore, UASs consisting of relay-based UAVs in which data are transferred via multiple UAVs have been studied to achieve long-distance communication with a high throughput. The time division long-term evolution advanced (TD-LTE-A) relaying technique may be applicable to UASs as it offers a reasonable solution. However, this technique is currently ineffective for UASs due to the limitation caused by its frame configuration. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we propose a method to optimize radio resources based on the TD-LTE-A frame structure, which is capable of realizing efficient relay communication. Our proposed method considers a flexible frame configuration and updates cycle of control information to overcome the shortcoming of the conventional scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed radio resource optimization is demonstrated through simulation under varying environments.