Aerial Base Station Placement: A Tutorial Introduction

TL;DR

This tutorial introduces the challenges and approaches for optimal placement of aerial base stations on UAVs to ensure high QoS in various scenarios, highlighting fundamental trade-offs and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of ABS placement challenges, approaches in 2D and 3D, and discusses adaptive strategies and future research directions.

Findings

Fundamental challenges in ABS placement are identified.

Various approaches for 2D and 3D placement are discussed.

Future research directions are outlined.

Abstract

The deployment of Aerial Base Stations (ABSs) mounted on board Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is emerging as a promising technology to provide connectivity in areas where terrestrial infrastructure is insufficient or absent. This may occur for example in remote areas, large events, emergency situations, or areas affected by a natural disaster such as a wildfire or a tsunami. To successfully materialize this goal, it is required that ABSs are placed at locations in 3D space that ensure a high quality of service (QoS) to the ground terminals. This paper provides a tutorial introduction to this ABS placement problem where the fundamental challenges and trade-offs are first investigated by means of a toy application example. Next, the different approaches in the literature to address the aforementioned challenges in both 2D or 3D space will be introduced and a discussion on adaptive placement will be provided. The paper is concluded by discussing future research directions.