Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication can be used in overcrowded areas and either during or postdisaster situations as an evolving technology to provide ubiquitous connections for wireless devices due to its flexibility, mobility, and good condition of the line of sight channels. In this paper, a single UAV is used as an aerial relay node to provide connectivity to wireless devices because of the considerable distance between wireless devices and the ground base station. Specifically, two path loss models have been utilized; a cellular‐to‐UAV path loss for a backhaul connection and an air‐to‐ground path loss model for a downlink connection scenario. Then, the tradeoff introduced by these models is discussed. The problem of efficient placement of an aerial relay node is formulated as an optimization problem, where the objective is to maximize the total throughput of wireless devices. To find an appropriate location for a relay aerial node that maximizes the overall throughput, we first use the particle swarm optimization algorithm to find the drone location; then, we use three different approaches, namely, (1) the equal power allocation approach, (2) water filling approach, and (3) modified water filling approach to maximize the total users’ throughput. The results show that the modified water filling outperforms the other two approaches in terms of the average sum rate of all users and the total number of served users. More specifically, in the best‐case scenario, it was observed that the average sum rate of the modified water filling is better than the equal power allocation and ensuring 100% coverage. In contrast, the water filling provides a very close average sum rate to the modified water filling, but it only provides a 28% user coverage.
Highlights
While most Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research works in wireless communication demonstrate UAV uses as an aerial base station [1,2,3,4,5], a recent growing trend is to use UAV as a relay node [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
We summarize the main contributions of this work as follows: (i) We utilize a cellular-to-UAV path loss model for the backhaul link [20] and an air-to-ground path loss model for the downlink [1, 21]; we discuss the tradeoff introduced by these models (ii) We formulate the problem of efficient placement of a single UAV, where the objective is to maximize ground users’ total throughput (iii) We propose to use the particle swarm optimization algorithm [22, 23] and the water-filling algorithm [24] to search for the optimal placement for a drone that maximizes the throughput and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm under different cases
Due to the large distance between the ground base station and the users located inside the coverage region where the natural disaster happened, a UAV was used as an aerial relay node to provide wireless coverage for wireless devices
Summary
While most UAV research works in wireless communication demonstrate UAV uses as an aerial base station [1,2,3,4,5], a recent growing trend is to use UAV as a relay node [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. UAV can be deployed as a relay node when the infrastructure of the terrestrial base station is damaged due to natural disasters or overloaded during crowded events [13,14,15]. Many works utilize UAV as a relay node in wireless communication. Kumar et al in [8] proposed to use a UAV as a relay node such that the quality of service requirement was guaranteed. In [9], the authors developed a closed-form to find the optimum placement of the UAV acts as a relay node
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