Joint Optimization of UAV Trajectory and Radio Resource Allocation for Drive-Thru Vehicular Networks

In recent years, providing connectivity to fast-moving vehicles on highways has been the focus of the wireless research community. In this paper, in the context of V2X, we propose using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to serve vehicles on a highway, where a UAV is dispatched in disaster situations (such as floods or earthquakes) to serve these vehicles, or to provide better coverage when vehicles are out of reach of road side units. We consider free flow scenario where vehicles moving between two road-side units and where the infrastructure is partially or totally unavailable. Our goal is to guarantee a certain Quality of Service (QoS) for each vehicle on the highway by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and the radio resource allocation. We show that during the UAV flight time, the UAV adapts its velocity to the velocities of the vehicles in the served cluster, to maximize the minimum average rate for each vehicle. Our findings are verified through Monte-Carlo simulation where we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design under different UAVs types.