Joint Mobility-Aware UAV Placement and Routing in Multi-Hop UAV Relaying Systems

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of optimally placing and routing UAVs in multi-hop aerial networks, considering mobility and traffic patterns, by formulating a MILP and proposing an efficient approximation algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a joint UAV placement and routing framework modeled as a MILP, with an LP rounding approximation to improve computational efficiency.

Findings

The proposed algorithm balances optimality and computational complexity.

The MILP formulation captures capacity and connectivity constraints.

The approach enhances UAV network deployment strategies.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively utilized to provide wireless connectivity in rural and under-developed areas, enhance network capacity and provide support for peaks or unexpected surges in user demand, mainly due to their fast deployment, cost-efficiency and superior communication performance resulting from Line of Sight (LoS)-dominated wireless channels. In order to exploit the benefits of UAVs as base stations or relays in a mobile network, a major challenge is to determine the optimal UAV placement and relocation strategy with respect to the mobility and traffic patterns of the ground network nodes. Moreover, considering that the UAVs form a multi-hop aerial network, capacity and connectivity constraints have significant impacts on the end-to-end network performance. To this end, we formulate the joint UAV placement and routing problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and propose an approximation that leads to a LP rounding algorithm and achieves a balance between time-complexity and optimality.