Long-Lasting UAV-aided RIS Communications based on SWIPT

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology for energy efficient wireless communications and has drawn significant attention recently. Combining unmanned aerial vehicle with RIS (UAV-RIS) can provide on-demand deployment services in dynamic scenarios. However, reaping the benefits of UAV-RIS will be limited by the energy of the battery-powered UAV. To enhance the endurance of UAV-RISs, we develop a novel energy harvesting scheme for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), resource allocation, and energy harvest from impinging radio-frequency (RF) signals. Different from the exist works, the proposed scheme creatively splits the passive reflected arrays on geometric space for transporting information and harvesting energy simultaneously. Furthermore, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) scheme is designed to continuously allocate UAV-RIS’s resources on both the time and space domains to maximize the total harvested energy, while guaranteeing the communication quality for each user. As shown by our simulation results, the proposed UAV-RIS SWIPT system improves performance significantly over the benchmark.