Cost-Efficient Deployment of a Reliable Multi-UAV Unmanned Aerial System

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytical framework for deploying multi-UAV systems that balances reliability and cost, optimizing coverage and availability for ground nodes using a Markov decision process model.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm that models UAV coverage as circular regions and analytically derives system availability through a birth-death MDP, optimizing deployment costs.

Findings

Cost reduction by considering traffic demand and GN distribution

Analytical derivation of system availability using MDP

Effective trade-off between reliability and investment cost

Abstract

In this work, we study the trade-off between the reliability and the investment cost of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) consisting of a set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying radio access nodes, called portable access points (PAPs)), deployed to serve a set of ground nodes (GNs). Using the proposed algorithm, a given geographical region is equivalently represented as a set of circular regions, where each circle represents the coverage region of a PAP. Then, the steady-state availability of the UAS is analytically derived by modelling it as a continuous time birth-death Markov decision process (MDP). Numerical evaluations show that the investment cost to guarantee a given steady-state availability to a set of GNs can be reduced by considering the traffic demand and distribution of GNs.