Cascaded Optimization of Aircraft Trajectories for Persistent Data Ferrying

摘要

This paper investigates the optimality of periodic trajectories of an unmanned aircraft ferrying data between two stationary sensor nodes. The aircraft has a single half-duplex radio channel for wireless communication, and it must allocate the channel along its trajectory to maximize data transfer between the nodes. The general data-ferrying problem is known to be nondeterministic polynomial-time hard. This work takes advantage of the problem structure to cascade the solution between trajectory optimization and bandwidth optimization. It is proven that this decomposition retains optimality, and the necessary conditions are derived for the trajectories to be optimal. Insights from these conditions lead to efficient policies on bandwidth allocation. The current cascaded method significantly reduces the dimension of the persistent data-ferrying problem and is verified in simulation to perform several orders of magnitude faster than the traditional noncascaded method.