Minimizing the Age of Information for Data Collection by Cellular-Connected UAV

This article considers the task-aware trajectory design problem of cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is dispatched to collect data from a set of points-of-interest (PoIs) on the ground. The collected data needs to be timely uploaded to the fusion center through the cellular network, and the design objective is to minimize the worst-case age of information (AoI) among all the PoIs. Due to the heterogeneous data generation time and the coverage holes of cellular network in the sky, the formulated UAV trajectory optimization problem is difficult to be directly solved. We reformulate the problem to a more tractable mixed integer convex optimization problem based on graph theory and solve it with CVX tools. Simulation results show that the proposed UAV trajectory design significantly improve the average and worst-case AoI for data collection, as compared with the benchmark schemes.