M Naga Manoj received his Master of Science – Dual Degree in  Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). His research work was supervised by Dr. Ubaidulla. Here’s a summary of his research work on Trajectory and Power Optimization for Buffer-Assisted Amplify-and-Forward Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Relay:

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 maximise 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 maximisation problem by jointly optimising 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 favour the UAV and ground nodes to communicate in the high SNR channel links, thus maintaining fairness.

May 2023