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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely employed in wireless communications, and the performance can be enhanced with the assistance of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). However, the finite energy of UAVs greatly limits the endurance and becomes a bottleneck for IRS-UAV communications. In this paper, an integrated IRS-UAV communication scheme is proposed where the IRS is mounted on the UAV to connect the base station and the ground user. We present two schemes to maximize the spectrum efficiency (SE) and the energy efficiency (EE) of the system by jointly optimizing the active beamforming, passive beamforming and UAV trajectory. First, to tackle the SE maximization problem, we divide it into three subproblems to optimize the variables iteratively. For the active and passive beamforming, the closed-form solutions can be directly derived. The suboptimal trajectory design can be obtained by utilizing the successive convex approximation. Furthermore, considering the limited on- broad energy of UAV, a scheme to maximize the EE is proposed. The optimal active beamforming and the passive beamforming can be similarly obtained. For the non-convex fractional programming of trajectory optimization, it can be solved via the Dinkelbach’s method. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are effective for the IRS-UAV networks to maximize the SE and EE, respectively.
Su et al. (2022) studied this question.