An Energy-Efficient Transmission Scheme for Buffer-Aided UAV Relaying Networks

Limited battery capacity is one of the critical issues affecting the network lifetime of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) because of its battery power supply. In this paper, an energy-efficient transmission scheme for buffer-aided UAV relaying networks is proposed. The relays are mounted on UAVs, which use buffers to store the received information and forward it to the destination when the channel quality is good. In particular, we consider adaptive link selection and adaptive power control for the considered network based on the channel state information(CSI), the buffer state and the remaining energy of UAVs. The transmit power is determined according to the amount of information in the buffer, and a threshold value of the transmit power is set to avoid the exponential growth of the transmission power caused by too much information in the buffer. Simulation results show that compared to conventional relaying protocols, the proposed scheme can improve the energy efficiency of buffer-aided UAV relaying networks and make a good trade off between the network lifetime and the average throughput.