Deployment and Association of Multiple UAVs in UAV-Assisted Cellular Networks With the Knowledge of Statistical User Position

Exploiting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying relays is becoming an indispensable strategy to assist terrestrial cellular networks to enhance coverage. One challenging problem for UAV-integrated cellular networks is how to design their deployment and association schemes to provide on-demand coverage with minimum network power consumption. In this paper, the uplink transmission in a UAV-assisted cellular network is studied with the objective of minimizing the transmit power consumption of users and UAVs through designing proper UAV deployment and association schemes. To avoid the computational complexity caused by the estimation of instantaneous position of users, we investigate UAV deployment and association schemes based on the statistical user position. By discretizing the space where UAV can be located, we build a centralized multi-agent $Q$ -learning algorithm, with which multiple UAVs update their positions in a joint manner. In the training process of $Q$ -learning algorithm, a reward function is built based on the optimal association scheme and its corresponding power consumption. By adopting the optimal transport theory, the existence of the unique optimal association scheme for given statistical user distribution and UAVs’ state is proved. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed designs considerably outperform the similar existing algorithms. Comparisons with the benchmark scheme show that the proposed scheme can bring about 85% energy efficiency improvement under the same simulation setups.