Towards A Realistic Path Planning Evaluation Model for Micro Aerial VehicleAssisted Localization of WiFi Nodes Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV)assisted localization of wireless nodes in a given area is especially important in postdisaster scenarios where no other communication infrastructure is accessibleDifferent from related work solely focusing on simulations, we have done a measurement campaign using a multirotor MAV to derive a realistic propagation model for our scenario. Based on this propagation model and a novel positioning approach, the performance of different trajectories is reevaluatedOur results show that in practice, the variance of the measurements is higher, than commonly expected in related work on MAVassisted localization. As a result, the study of our developed trajectories show localization errors of 67m in a 400x400m2 area. We also show that adaptive trajectories outperform stateoftheart algorithms and are able to localize at least 90% of the nodes in under 20 minutes. Thus, they also outperform other algorithms with respect to the effectiveness of the trajectory.

3D Trajectory Optimization in Rician Fading for UAVEnabled Data Harvesting In this paper, we consider a UAVenabled WSN where a flying UAV is employed to collect data from multiple sensor nodes (SNs). Our objective is to maximize the minimum average data collection rate from all SNs subject to a prescribed reliability constraint for each SN by jointly optimizing the UAV communication scheduling and threedimensional (3D) trajectory. Different from the existing works that assume the simplified lineofsight (LoS) UAVground channels, we consider the more practically accurate angledependent Rician fading channels between the UAV and SNs with the Rician factors determined by the corresponding UAVSN elevation angles. However, the formulated optimization problem is intractable due to the lack of a closedform expression for a key parameter termed effective fading power that characterizes the achievable rate given the reliability requirement in terms of outage probability. To tackle this difficulty, we first approximate the parameter by a logistic (u0027Su0027 shape) function with respect to the 3D UAV trajectory by using the data regression method. Then the original problem is reformulated to an approximate form, which, however, is still challenging to solve due to its nonconvexity. As such, we further propose an efficient algorithm to derive its suboptimal solution by using the block coordinate descent technique, which iteratively optimizes the communication scheduling, the UAVu0027s horizontal trajectory, and its vertical trajectory. The latter two subproblems are shown to be nonconvex, while locally optimal solutions are obtained for them by using the successive convex approximation technique. Last, extensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and draw new insights on the 3D UAV trajectory under the Rician fading as compared to conventional LoS channel models.