Resource optimization for energy‐efficient NOMA‐based multi‐UAV‐enabled relaying networks

Abstract Owing to the advantages of low cost, flexibility, and the transmission characteristics of air–ground (AG) channels, using the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as mobile relay to assist wireless communication has received significant interest recently. A green non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)‐based multi‐UAV‐enabled relaying system with different rate requirements is proposed here. To improve energy efficiency (EE) of the UAV relays, an optimization problem for user grouping, UAV trajectory design and resource allocation under the constraints of information causality constraint, UAVs' maximum service capacity, maximum transmit power constraint, and different communication rate requirements of the mobile users (MUs) is formulated. According to the grouping results, the UAVs' trajectory and power allocation by Dinkelbach method, successive convex approximation, and condensation algorithm are alternately optimized. To solve this highly coupled non‐linear mixed integer programming problem, a graph‐based grouping algorithm is proposed to reduce the relative distance between the UAV relay and the MU. Simulation results show that the proposed optimization algorithm can effectively improve the EE performance of this NOMA‐based multi‐UAV‐enabled relaying system.