Communication-Aware UAV Path Planning

Abstract

Autonomous air drones, known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), often carry out missions with real-time video streaming. In this work, we address the off-line mission plan problem of computing the optimal path from an origin to a final destination in two-dimensional space in order to maximize the quality of the communication, given a cellular coverage, and thus to provide throughput guarantees to the video streaming. In addressing the problem, we consider the energy budget constraint, the presence of wind in the area and the path smoothing problem. We propose novel path planning algorithms that are shown to outperform classical approaches that are oblivious of communication network coverage.