On Supporting Multiservices in UAV-Enabled Aerial Communication for Internet of Things

Multiservices are of fundamental importance in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled aerial communications for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiservices are challenging in terms of requirements and use of shared resources such that the traditional solutions for a single service are unsuitable for the multiservices. In this article, we consider a UAV-enabled aerial access network for ground IoT devices, each of which requires two types of services, namely, ultrareliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), measured by transmission delay and effective rate, respectively. We first consider a communication model that accounts for most of the propagation phenomena experienced by wireless signals. Then, we derive the expressions of the effective rate and the transmission delay, and formulate each service type as an optimization problem with the constraints of resource allocation and UAV deployment to enable multiservice support for the IoT. These two optimization problems are nonlinear and nonconvex and are generally difficult to be solved. To this end, we transform them into linear optimization problems, and propose two iterative algorithms to solve them. Based on them, we further propose a linear program algorithm to jointly optimize the two service types, which achieves a tradeoff of the effective rate and the transmission delay. Extensive performance evaluations have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reaching a tradeoff optimization that enhances the two services.