3D Location and Resource Allocation Optimization for UAV-Enabled Emergency Networks Under Statistical QoS Constraint

Haibin Niu,Xinyu Zhao,Jing Li

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3065055

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations have attracted great attention in emergency communication networks due to flexible deployment. With the popularization of smart devices, the demand for multimedia services is increasing in disaster relief. Therefore, it is very important to significantly improve throughput of unmanned aerial vehicle base station (UAV-BS) while ensuring quality-of-service (QoS) of multimedia traffic. In this paper, we consider a UAV-BS to serve a group of users in the downlink who have different statistical delay-bound QoS requirements in an emergency situation. We formulate a problem to maximize the sum statistical-QoS-guaranteed throughput (effective capacity) of all users by jointly optimizing the UAV's 3D location, power and bandwidth allocation under each user's statistical QoS requirement constraint. The formulated problem is a non-linear non-convex optimization problem, which is very difficult to solve. To this end, we propose an efficient iteration algorithm based on the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques to solve it. Specifically, we decouple the primary problem into three sub-problems, which can be approximated as easy-to-solve convex optimization problems. In each iteration, three sub-problems are alternately optimized. Finally, numerical simulation results prove the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm compared with benchmarks.

Highlights

This paper considers a Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-BS connected to the core network via a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite to provide multimedia services for multiple downlink users with different statistical QoS in an emergency situation
In this paper, we propose an emergency communication network architecture which integrates UAV and LEO satellites for disaster areas lacking ground facilities
We propose an efficient iteration algorithm based on the block coordinate descent [4] and successive convex optimization (SCO) techniques [34], [35] to solve it

Summary

Introduction

[3], [4] For this reason, more and more researches have begun to focus on integrating UAVs into emergency communication networks as aerial base stations [5], [6] or relays [7], [8]. Some disasters occur in a large area and the communication facilities are severely damaged, such as earthquake and tsunami, the UAV cannot find a backhaul node on the ground to connect to the core network. LEO satellite networks have short transmission delay, large bandwidth and small path loss characteristics, etc [9]–[11]. LEO satellites are very suitable as backhaul nodes when lacking ground facilities [12]

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Results

Conclusion