Energy-Efficient Beamforming and Power Control for Uplink NOMA in mmWave UAV Networks

The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the terrestrial communications networks with a variety of tasks is viewed as a key technology for 5G and beyond. In this work, we consider the uplink millimeter-wave (mmWave) transmission between a set of UAVs and a base station (BS), where the UAVs deploy uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in multiple clusters. Furthermore, the BS also serves its own desired ground user equipment (UE) in the presence of many other ground UEs associated with other cells, which share the same frequency band. Considering the limited energy budget of UAVs, we formulate an energy efficiency (EE) problem, and propose a solution aided by the Dinkelbach's algorithm and successive convex approximation (SCA). Using realistic air-to-ground (A2G) and terrestrial channel models, we assess the performance of the proposed algorithm under various circumstances (maximum transmit power for UAVs, quality-of-service (QoS) constraint for the desired UE, etc.), and identify the best use cases.