3D Placement of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Station for Maximum Coverage of Users with Different QoS Requirements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D placement strategy for UAV-based base stations that maximizes user coverage with diverse QoS needs, employing an optimal exhaustive search and a low-complexity algorithm with comparable performance.

Contribution

It presents the first study on 3D UAV-BS placement for maximizing coverage with different QoS requirements, proposing both an optimal and a low-complexity algorithm.

Findings

MWA algorithm performs close to ES with lower complexity

Proposed methods effectively maximize user coverage with QoS differentiation

Numerical simulations validate the efficiency of the algorithms

Abstract

The need for a rapid-to-deploy solution for providing wireless cellular services can be realized by unmanned aerial vehicle base stations (UAV-BSs). To the best of our knowledge, this letter is the first in literature that studies a novel 3D UAV-BS placement that maximizes the number of covered users with different Quality-of-Service requirements. We model the placement problem as a multiple circles placement problem and propose an optimal placement algorithm that utilizes an exhaustive search (ES) over a one-dimensional parameter in a closed region. We also propose a low-complexity algorithm, namely, maximal weighted area (MWA) algorithm to tackle the placement problem. Numerical simulations are presented showing that the MWA algorithm performs very close to the ES algorithm with a significant complexity reduction.