UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks for Stringent Applications: Resource Allocation and Positioning

In natural disasters and unforeseen incidents, such as floods, earthquakes and hurricanes, the traditional communication infrastructure may become unavailable to support the emergency tele-operations. Under such circumstances, deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as small flying base stations is seen as a promising solution to provide real-time data communication between physicians and remote robots in both up-link and down-link directions with strict transmission requirements. This paper studies the joint optimization problem of resource allocation and UAVs positioning in UAV-assisted wireless networks with the goal of minimizing the number of deployed UAVs. Since the formulated problem is a non-convex mixed-integer non-linear programming problem, efficient heuristic and genetic solutions are proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm approaches the genetic one with an important reduction in computational complexity.