On the Energy Consumption of Rotary Wing and Fixed Wing UAVs in Flying Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used to enable wireless communications. Due to their characteristics, such as the ability to hover and carry cargo, UAVs can serve as communications nodes, including Wi-Fi Access Points and Cellular Base Stations. In previous work, we proposed the Sustainable multi-UAV Performance-aware Placement (SUPPLY) algorithm, which focuses on the energy-efficient placement of multiple UAVs acting as Flying Access Points (FAPs). Additionally, we developed the Multi-UAV Energy Consumption (MUAVE) simulator to evaluate the UAV energy consumption, specifically when using the SUPPLY algorithm. However, MUAVE was initially designed to compute the energy consumption for rotary-wing UAVs only. In this paper, we propose eMUAVE, an enhanced version of the MUAVE simulator that allows the evaluation of the energy consumption for both rotary-wing and fixed-wing UAVs. Our energy consumption evaluation using eMUAVE considers reference and random networking scenarios. The results show that fixed-wing UAVs can be employed in the majority of networking scenarios. However, rotary-wing UAVs are typically more energy-efficient than fixed-wing UAVs when following the trajectories defined by SUPPLY.