Joint Communication and Computation Resource Scheduling of a Solar-Powered UAV-Assisted Communication System for Platooning Vehicles

There are some areas in the road traffic where communication base stations (BSs) are not deployed, or the communication is interrupted due to the damage of BSs caused by geological disasters, which will not be able to meet the demand of information interaction between vehicles and BSs. In this paper, we considered the coupled effects of the platoon vehicles, air-to-ground (A2G) and ground-to-air (G2A) communications, onboard data compression and photovoltaic energy harvesting and proposed a joint computation and communication resources scheduling optimization strategy for maximizing the throughput of solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication system. To tackle the resulting optimization problem, we used an improved successive convex approximation method. The simulation results show that the strategy has 18.5% and 50.8% improvement in total data transmission compared to the uniform power transmission strategy and the random power transmission strategy, respectively.