Joint Resource Allocation and Reflecting Design in IRS-UAV Communication Networks with SWIPT

Since the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology can flexibly change wireless network links signal, the UAV-IRS network system is a potential solution to increase the communication performance gain. Motivated by the practicality of UAV-IRS networks, a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) heterogeneous UAV communication system with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is considered, which consists of multiple UAV base stations (UBSs), a macro base station (MBS), and multiple IRSs for auxiliary communications. This paper pursues a goal to receive the system energy efficiency (EE) maximization by resource allocation and reflecting design of IRSs. Due to the strong coupling among multiple parameters in the original problem, this complex non-convex problem is decomposed into three stages. In the first stage, this paper decouples the problem into two subproblems of NOMA subchannel assignment and SIC decoding order to find the optimal solution separately. For the second stage, under the constraints of UAV’s maximum transmit power, users’ quality of service (QoS) requirements, user energy harvesting threshold and cross-layer interference constraints, a beamforming design based on Lagrangian duality is exploited. For the third stage, the power splitting (PS) factors and the reflecting phases of the IRS are jointly optimized using the penalty-SDR algorithm to approximate the suboptimal solution. Finally, the simulation curves exhibit the validity and excellent performance of the co-design scheme in improving the system EE.