Energy-Efficient Multi-UAVs Deployment and Movement for Emergency Response

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized to provide communication services for the areas where the communication is unavailable due to the high mobility, agility and low cost. In this letter, we investigate the energy efficient UAVs deployment and the movement for emergency response in the multi-UAVs enabled wireless communication system. The positions of the UAVs, the users association and the transmit power of the ground users are jointly optimized to maximize the energy efficiency of all ground users. And when one UAV leaves because of the breakdown or the drained battery, how the other UAVs move with the minimum energy cost is also studied. An alternating algorithm based on successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is proposed to solve the formulated optimization problems. Numerical results show the proposed multi-UAVs deployment and movement outperform the benchmarks.