Position optimization for mobile relay communications with constrained energy over a whole horizontal plane

This paper concerns the position optimization problem of a mobile relay over a whole horizontal plane. This problem is important because the position of a mobile relay directly affects the end-to-end performance, e.g., reliability, connectivity, and data rate. In this paper, we propose a new position optimization scheme of a mobile relay over a whole horizontal plane based on the one-bit feedback information from the destination node, which improves the performance over the prior scheme whose position of the mobile relay is optimized over a fixed orbit. In the proposed scheme, the mobile relay is equipped with merely one single onboard antenna. Moreover, no prior information about the positions of both the source node and the destination node is required. Thus, the proposed scheme can work at low network resources scenario, which is particularly suitable for mobile relay communication with constrained energy, e.g., the communications in a disaster area where the infrastructure is heavily damaged, volcano monitoring, and wireless powered communication networking. According to the characteristics of the proposed scheme, we further design two heuristic implementations to calculate the optimal position of a mobile relay over a whole horizontal plane. The first implementation has better steady performance whereas the second implementation has better convergence speed. We implement the proposed scheme and conduct an extensive performance comparison between the proposed scheme and prior schemes to verify the advantages of the proposed scheme.