Energy-Efficient Power Control for Drone Communications

Abstract:
This work aims at developing an energy-efficient power control algorithm for a swarm of drones that simultaneously transmit data to the serving base station while moving around a given coverage area. A stochastic mobility model based on random walk is developed, which guarantees boundedness and continuity of the movement, and used in a non-cooperative stochastic differential game, with utility functions defined by an Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation for each drone. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium point, and develop a distributed algorithm whose convergence to such equilibrium point is guaranteed. Numerical results are used to validate the performance of the proposed solution.