CA3D: Computing Accessibility-Aware Cooperative 3D Deployment of Multiple UAVs

TL;DR

This paper introduces CA3D, a novel method for cooperative 3D deployment of multiple UAVs that optimizes computing accessibility to enhance task completion and robustness across different ground user distributions.

Contribution

The paper provides a theoretical analysis linking computing accessibility to task completion and develops a deployment strategy balancing accessibility, task success, and redundancy.

Findings

CA3D outperforms baseline deployment methods in simulations.

Under hotspot distribution, CA3D nearly achieves full task completion.

Under random distribution, CA3D improves task completion probability by about 35%.

Abstract

This letter investigates computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment of multiple UAVs for task completion enhancement, termed CA3D. We first provide a theoretical analysis showing that computing accessibility is the key mechanism linking UAV deployment to delay-constrained task completion, and that UAV inter-spacing creates a fundamental tradeoff between computing-resource accessibility and task completion. We then develop a cooperative 3D deployment design that jointly balances accessible computing capacity, task completion probability, and redundant UAV overlap. Simulation results under heterogeneous computing node capacities show that CA3D consistently outperforms Random, Fixed, and Greedy deployment baselines under both hotspot and random ground user (GU) distributions. Under the hotspot GU distribution, CA3D achieves nearly full task completion, improving the task completion probability by about 3.3x over Random deployment when the number of UAVs is 8. Under a more challenging random GU distribution, CA3D still achieves about 35% higher task completion probability than the best baseline when the number of UAVs is 12. These results demonstrate that computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment improves not only task completion but also robustness to GU distribution changes.