UAV-Enabled Wireless Power Transfer: A Tutorial Overview

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) has recently emerged as a promising technique to provide sustainable energy supply for widely distributed low-power ground devices (GDs) in large-scale networks. Compared with the transmitters (ETs) conventional WPT systems which are deployed at fixed locations, UAV-mounted ETs can fly flexibly three-dimensional (3D) space charge nearby GDs more efficiently. This paper provides tutorial overview on UAV-enabled and its appealing applications, particular focusing how exploit UAVs’ controllable mobility via their 3D trajectory design maximize amounts of transferred all network fairness. First, we consider single-UAV-enabled scenario one UAV wirelessly charging multiple known locations. To solve maximization problem this case, present general framework consisting three innovative approaches optimize trajectory, multi-location hovering, successive-hover-and-fly, time-quantization-based optimization, respectively. Next, multi-UAV-enabled where UAVs cooperatively many large area. Building upon single-UAV design, propose two efficient schemes jointly trajectories, based principles swarming GD clustering, Furthermore, important extensions WPT, namely powered communication networks (WPCN) mobile edge computing (MEC), by integrating emerging WPCN MEC techniques, For both cases, investigate communication/computation resource allocations system performance, subject availability constraints GDs. Finally, open problems directions future research discussed.