Power Consumption Minimization of UAV Relay in NOMA Networks

In this letter, we consider employing a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as relay to ferry data from a remote base station to multiple ground users. Our objective is to minimize the power consumption of UAV by jointly optimizing the location and transmission power of UAV. The formulated problem is non-convex with highly coupled binary discrete constraints, which is intractable to solve. Firstly, it is transformed into a more tractable form, where the logarithmic constraints are transformed into polynomial form, and the discrete constraints are transformed into continuous form. Then the non-convex equality constraints are handled by penalty method, while the non-convex inequality constraints are handled by successive convex approximation technique. Based on these measures, we propose a double-loop iterative algorithm to obtain the solution approximately. Numerical results show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.