An Optimized LTE-Based Technique for Drone Base Station Dynamic 3D Placement and Resource Allocation in Delay-Sensitive M2M Networks

Abstract

Drones are expected to facilitate extending wireless networks’ access for both human users and smart machine-type-communication devices (MTCDs) with strict and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose an optimal solution for the dynamic placement of an LTE drone-mounted base station to maximize the coverage of the MTCDs deployed over a large geographical area. The resulting technique jointly optimizes the drone's 3D positioning to maximize coverage and allocates the network resources in such a way that gives high priority to the delay-sensitive machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic. This optimization algorithm determines the optimal bound of the solution. Since it cannot be used in real-time operations due to its computational complexity, we also introduce a heuristic technique that offers a near-optimal solution with much reduced complexity. We conduct several simulation evaluations to assess the proposed techniques. These results are compared to those of other drone placement approaches. The comparisons show that the proposed techniques offer significantly better results in the communication coverage while fulfilling the diverse QoS requirements of the deployed M2M network. Moreover, the heuristic-based technique is shown to succeed in finding solutions close to the optimal bound with a considerable reduction of complexity over the exact algorithm.