Fundamental Trade-Offs for UAV Communications

Motivated by the new and interesting trade-offs among the throughput, delay, and (propulsion) energy consumption in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication and trajectory design, this chapter provides an overview on the state-of-the-art results on them. It focuses on the use of UAVs as communication platforms to serve terrestrial users, although such fundamental trade-offs also exist similarly in the other paradigm with UAVs as new aerial users to be served by the ground base stations in the cellular network. The chapter investigates the joint UAV trajectory and communication design to characterize the throughput–delay trade-off. It investigates further the throughput–energy trade-off in UAV-enabled communication and trajectory design. The throughput–energy trade-off can be further extended by taking the ground users’ energy consumption into account, e.g., in the application of UAV-enabled data collection in Internet-of-Things networks.