December 2022
Naga Manoj Makkena, M.S Dual Degree-ECE, working under supervision of Dr. Ubaidulla P received the best paper award for their research work on Trajectory and power optimization for buffer assisted amplify-and-forward UAV relay at the 11th international conference on Communications, Networks and Satellites (COMNETSAT-2022) at Solo, Indonesian island of Java from 3 – 5 November. Surakarta (also known as Solo) is a city and historic royal capital on the Indonesian island of Java.
Research work as explained by the authors:
This paper proposes a buffer-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay for communication between two ground nodes without a direct link. These communications are essential in disaster rescue areas where fairness plays a significant role. To achieve fairness, we aim to maximize the minimum information rate. The traditional way of prefixed scheduling the time slots to transfer and receive at the UAV does not guarantee that the communication system uses high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) communication links instead of low SNR links. Therefore, we choose to employ a buffer at the UAV to store the information and transfer it to the destination nodes in the high SNR links. The pairing of time slots is necessary here since we are using a buffer, and we do not know in which time slot data is transmitted to the destination node after it is received at the UAV. Consequently, we formulate a fairness maximization problem by jointly optimizing the trajectory and power control. Unfortunately, this formulation results in a non-convex problem. We propose a solution based on the principles of the minimize-maximize (MM) algorithm and linear programming relaxation techniques to solve the fairness problem and pairing of time slots. Numerical results demonstrate that the trajectory, power control, and paired slots favor the UAV and ground nodes to communicate in the high SNR channel links, thus maintaining fairness.
COMNETSAT is the flagship conference of the IEEE Indonesia Section which was held virtually. This scientific conference is often referred to as IEEE COMNETSAT. This conference is a major international forum for scientists, researchers, engineers, and practitioners interested in the study, analysis, design, modeling, and implementation. Implementation in COMNETSAT, machine systems, computational intelligence, science and engineering systems both theoretically and practically in various fields of application.
Conference page: https://comnetsat.org/