Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) require frequent transmissions to a ground station. In this paper, we consider Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and equip the ground station with a Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) radio, and thereby, allowing it to receive multiple transmissions simultaneously. A key problem is to identify a suitable TDMA transmission schedule that allows UAVs to transmit successfully and frequently to the ground station. Moreover, in order for SIC to operate, there must be a sufficient difference in received power at the ground station. However, in practice, due to the mobility and orientation of UAVs, the ground station experiences random channel gains. To this end, we adopt a discrete optimization approach to select a transmission schedule that yields the highest expected number of successes against random channel gains. We prove our approach is able to find the optimal transmission schedule. In addition, we propose a novel heuristic approach to generate a subset of transmission schedules for use in large-scale UAV networks. Our results show both proposed approaches yield high throughput under various network conditions. The average number of successful transmissions for schedules generated by our solutions is greater than 70%. In contrast, a competing approach only has an average success rate of less than 50%. Lastly, we conducted a trace-based simulation using data from a testbed with three static or mobile UAVs. Our results show that using a transmission schedule where at most two UAVs transmit yields more transmission successes.

中文翻译：

---

使用离散优化的多无人机网络中的下行链路吞吐量最大化

无人驾驶飞行器 (UAV) 需要频繁传输到地面站。在本文中，我们考虑时分多址 (TDMA) 并为地面站配备连续干扰消除 (SIC) 无线电，从而允许它同时接收多个传输。一个关键问题是确定合适的 TDMA 传输时间表，使 UAV 能够成功且频繁地向地面站传输。此外，为了使 SIC 工作，地面站的接收功率必须有足够的差异。然而，在实践中，由于无人机的移动性和定向性，地面站会经历随机信道增益。为此，我们采用离散优化方法来选择一个传输调度，该调度针对随机信道增益产生最高预期成功次数。我们证明我们的方法能够找到最佳传输时间表。此外，我们提出了一种新颖的启发式方法来生成用于大规模无人机网络的传输时间表子集。我们的结果表明，两种提议的方法在各种网络条件下都能产生高吞吐量。我们的解决方案生成的时间表的平均成功传输次数超过 70%。相比之下，竞争方法的平均成功率不到 50%。最后，我们使用来自三个静态或移动无人机的测试台的数据进行了基于轨迹的模拟。