Geometric Analysis-Based 3D Anti-Block UAV Deployment for mmWave Communications

Abstract

In this letter, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) three-dimensional (3D) deployment problem for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is examined. Due to the sensitivity of mmWave signals to blockages, the existence of line-of-sight (LoS) links plays a vital role in guaranteeing high quality communication. To deploy UAVs effectively and ensure LoS communications, we propose a two-stage anti-block UAV deployment method based on building geometric analysis. First, by employing the established signal blockage aware mmWave channel model, a blockage testing K-means (BT-K-means) algorithm is proposed to implement user clustering and preliminary deployment of UAVs. Then, to overcome the difficulty of finding the optimal location of a UAV due to frequent local oscillation of the path loss (PL) function, a PL oscillation-aware UAV 3D coordinate search algorithm is proposed, which can avoid signal blockages and effectively reduce the total PL. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through our simulation results.