Age-of-Information Minimization for UAV-Based Multi-View Sensing and Communication
Wenwen Jiang, Bo Ai, Chao Shen, Mushu Li, Xuemin Shen
Abstract
Due to flexible deployment and controllable mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have great potential for supporting many time-critical sensing applications. In this article, we investigate UAV-based wireless sensing and communication in which one UAV with an onboard camera sensor senses ground targets from multiple different views and transmits the sensing data to a remote ground controller (GC). With the objective of improving the freshness of the information received at the GC while ensuring the sensing quality, we develop a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MUlti-view SensIng and Communication (MUSIC)</i> framework and jointly optimize the parameters in the framework including the target visiting sequence, the number of sensing, UAV trajectory, service time and transmit power. To solve the corresponding mixed-integer non-convex problem, we propose a two-stage approach. Specifically, we first determine the target visiting sequence by considering a specific case, i.e., UAV senses each target only once, through the quadratic penalty (QP) and successive convex approximation (SCA) methods. Based on the obtained visiting sequence, we minimize the average peak age-of-information (PAoI) of all targets by jointly optimizing the variables contained in the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MUSIC</i> framework via the SCA and exhaustion methods. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint optimization approach outperforms the benchmark schemes.