Deployment algorithm for minimum unmanned aerial vehicles towards optimal coverage and interconnections

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an important role in serving ground users as base stations (BSs) during temporary events, or after terrestrial BSs fail. UAV deployment is a fundamental and vital problem which directly affects the coverage capacity and user experience. Especially, while deploying a UAV backbone network, the cost and the quality of service (QoS) of the ground users as well as the connectivity among UAVs need to be considered jointly. In this paper, the deployment problem is modeled as minimizing the amount of deployed UAVs while guaranteeing the coverage capacity and connectivity among UAVs. Further, a novel UAV deployment scheme is proposed where a heuristic algorithm is adopted to delete locations from the initially defined candidate UAV locations iteratively, and UAVs are deployed at the remaining locations finally. The simulation results show that our UAV deployment scheme can achieve minimum deployed UAVs while ensuring QoS requirements and a robust network among UAVs.

I. Introduction

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) working as flying base stations(BSs) to serve the ground user equipment (UE) have attracted significant attentions nowadays due to their agility and mobility [1]. UAVs could assist even replace the terrestrial cellular network in a variety of scenarios because their high altitude can enable line-of-sight (LoS) communication links to the ground users and reap an improved coverage and rate performance. Especially, in case of temporary events (such as disaster relief network), hotspot areas or military events, UAVs can be rapidly deployed to meet the sudden demand for wireless services [2].