Wireless Self-Energy Recycling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Terrestrial Broadcasting

This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for terrestrial broadcast service transmission, including a self-energy recycling module for a wireless power transfer (WPT) in terms of the energy efficiency of broadcasting rate and the UAV's power consumption. For UAV with a limited battery capacity, the self-energy recycling technology may become attractive solution to alleviate the power consumption. In this paper, we derive the aggregate harvested power from multiple UAVs, and then the upper bound of the UAV energy efficiency, which makes it possible to effectively investigate and predict the UAV energy efficiency for various system configurations. Via numerical results, the superiority and feasibility of self-energy recycling in UAV-based terrestrial broadcasting is validated with the comparison of conventional UAV system without self-energy recycling.