Efficient multi-UAV Relay Nodes Placement Scheme in Wireless Networks

Abstract

the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used only for military operations. Currently, the potential uses and applicability of UAVs in commercial, agricultural and civilian application domains are becoming a fast-growing phenomenon. Although the performance of the wireless network greatly depends on the network topology, employing UAVs equipped with wireless communication devices as network relay nodes (RNs) are also becoming increasingly crucial in enhancing the connectivity and efficiency of the ground network. It could be considered as one of the best solutions to efficiently relay wireless communications for multi-ground units such as terminal nodes. However, placement of multi-UAV RNs is a challenging issue, especially in large network deployment scenarios. The issue of multi-UAV RNs placement scheme in wireless networks is also relatively less explored area than the existing approaches. Accordingly, designing an efficient multi-UAV RNs placement mechanism that minimize the number of required UAV RNs and render reliable connectivity for large number of ground terminal nodes through optimizing the placement and enhancing the network coverage has paramount importance. Deploying a minimum set of UA V RNs in such a way that every terminal node has at least one or two UAV RNs within its one-hop coverage and forming a connected network of the UAV RNs together with one or more ground control stations is a problem and also hard to achieve global optimal solution. Therefore, in this paper we propose an efficient multi-UAV RNs placement scheme in wireless networks that improves the performance of the ground network communication coverage and quality of the wireless network. Evaluation result reveals that both the density of ground terminal nodes and the size of the deployment region have an impact on the placement of the required number of multi-UA V RNs.