Framework for fast and low-complexity deployment of UAVs-assisted communication

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can work as aerial base stations along with the ground base stations to enhance capacity and provide ubiquitous coverage in 5G and beyond communication systems. UAVs have numerous features that distinguish them from the traditional fixed ground network infrastructure. These features include more flexibility, lower costs, faster integration, and better channel conditions with users owing to the UAVs maneuverability and adaptability to varying network conditions. This paper addresses UAVs positioning and radio resource management, which are two critical design issues that greatly impact the system performance and user experience in UAVs-assisted communication scenarios. Our objective is maximizing the achieved sum rate of a system consisting of a ground base station and a number of UAVs operating as aerial base stations under constraints on the minimum rate requirements of users, the capacity of wireless backhaul links between the UAVs and the ground base station, and the power budgets of the base stations. In doing so, we optimize the UAVs locations, the users-to-base stations association, the access link channels assignment, and the power allocation. The problem is a mixed-integer non-convex optimization, which is NP-hard to solve, and consequently we propose a fast low-complexity algorithm that achieves high performance compared to the common block coordinate descent-based solution approach and at much less execution time.