UAV Comprehensive Coverage to Users in Urban Environment

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)are widely used to provide network coverage in emergency situations due to their high flexibility and air-ground channel link. In urban scenarios, building blockage can severely weaken the link signal between UAV and users. Hence, how to deploy UAVs avoiding link blockage as far as possible is meaningful for improving UAV - user communication quality. To deal with this problem, we propose two efficient algorithms to determine the optimal UAV deployment in urban environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can not only solve the user comprehensive coverage problem, but also obtain quality UAV-user links.

I. Introduction

In recent years, the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)in various environments have developed rapidly, due to UAVs' easy deployment, low acquisition and maintenance costs, high-maneuverability and ability to hover [1]–[3]. In particular, UAVs can be suitable for providing emergency network coverage in areas without infrastructures, such as disaster scene. Via UAV emergency communication, we can know the user state and help them for self-rescue. Therefore, it is meaningful to provide efficient network service to these users through UAVs.