Age of Information Based Scheduling for UAV Aided Localization and Communication

In this paper, we propose a novel UAV aided ground nodes (GNs) localization and communication integrated framework, where the age of information (AoI) is introduced to evaluate the system timeliness. We aim to jointly optimize the UAV trajectory, localization accuracy, bandwidth and beamwidth, to guarantee the information freshness. Specifically, we give a two-stage method, where a low complexity initial UAV trajectory searching algorithm is firstly proposed, based on the rough position information of GNs. Afterwards, we formulate a joint UAV location and resource optimization problem. This essential mixed integer problem can be solved by efficient successive convex approximation based iterative algorithm. Simulations show that the localization and communication integrated framework can obtain about 50% performance gain compared with the UAV communication aid only solution, and over 37% performance gain via proper resource allocation. Moreover, the analysis reveals that our proposed scheme strikes a balance among the time durations of localization, data transmission and UAV movement. Additionally, we conduct practical experiments to draw valuable insights into the system design and implementations (An experimental can be found on the supplementary materials, or online at https://youtu.be/OX6Bgz6naUA).