Efficient deployment of connected unmanned aerial vehicles for optimal target coverage

Anytime and anywhere network access can be provided by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with air-to-ground and air-to-air communications using directional antennas for targets located on the ground. Deploying these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to cover targets is a complex problem since each target should be covered, while minimizing (i) the deployment cost and (ii) the UAV altitudes to ensure good communication quality. We also consider connectivity between the UAVs and a base station in order to collect and send information to the targets, which is not considered in many similar studies. In this paper, we provide an efficient optimal program to solve this problem and show the trade-off analysis due to conflicting objectives. We propose a fair trade-off optimal solution and also evaluate the cost of adding connectivity to the UAV deployment.