Placement Optimization of UAV-Mounted Mobile Base Stations

TL;DR

This paper presents a polynomial-time algorithm for optimally placing UAV-mounted mobile base stations to minimize their number while ensuring coverage of all ground terminals, improving efficiency in wireless networks without fixed infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel successive placement algorithm that efficiently covers distributed ground terminals with fewer UAV-mounted base stations.

Findings

The proposed algorithm reduces the number of MBSs needed compared to existing schemes.

It performs favorably in terms of time complexity and coverage efficiency.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the placement strategy.

Abstract

In terrestrial communication networks without fixed infrastructure, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted mobile base stations (MBSs) provide an efficient solution to achieve wireless connectivity. This letter aims to minimize the number of MBSs needed to provide wireless coverage for a group of distributed ground terminals (GTs), ensuring that each GT is within the communication range of at least one MBS. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm with successive MBS placement, where the MBSs are placed sequentially starting on the area perimeter of the uncovered GTs along a spiral path towards the center, until all GTs are covered. Each MBS is placed to cover as many uncovered GTs as possible, with higher priority given to the GTs on the boundary to reduce the occurrence of outlier GTs that each may require one dedicated MBS for its coverage. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably compared to other schemes in terms of the total number of required MBSs and/or time complexity.