A Fairness-tunable Strategy for Intelligent Energy Balancing in UAV-IoT Systems

The coupling of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems can provide an efficient method to collect ground data for the Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Under this UAV-IoT scenario, an intelligent energy balancing strategy should be designed to achieve tunable energy fairness level among all the IoT devices, such that sensors can differ in their life-spans to meet specific application requirements. In this paper, we propose an intelligent cr-fairness strategy to balance the energy consumption among IoT sensors. Specifically, the heterogeneities among the sensor nodes, i.e., different data loads, diverse residual energy levels, and distinct channel gains, have been taken into consideration. Based on this, an cr-utility function is designed. In the maximization of the utility function, the bandwidth allocation, transmission power, and the UAV's trajectory are jointly optimized. In addition, we also demonstrate how to judiciously tune the a value according to the specific application scenarios, thus to achieve different levels of energy fairness and promote the functional longevity of the system to the best effort.