Optimal Decision on Placement of an Auxiliary Aerial Wireless Base Station Using the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

Abstract

With the continuous growth and dependence on technology, new approaches are introduced to augment a cellular network coverage of users when they are not completely fulfilled by terrestrial base stations in scenarios of disasters, unpredictable surge in service demands, or in case of a malfunction in the terrestrial infrastructure. Solutions for backing the network via an auxiliary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Station (UAV-BS) have been proposed in the literature that will provide additional wireless service resources to the affected area. Although UAVs provide a quick fix and are a great alternative in several cases and scenarios; their effective and efficient placement is considered to be one of the fundamental challenges because the problem is non-convex in general. That is due to the relatively complex procedure in selecting the optimal three dimensional position of the UAV that guarantees the maximum number of covered users, which can reflect in certain scenarios into maximum revenue. To that end, we start by reviewing the properties and formulation of a selection procedure of the three dimensional (3D) position of the UAV, which has the form of a constrained optimization problem. Then, we use the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm to find the optimal solution for this 3D placement problem of the UAV-BS. Simulations results verify the validity of our solution approach and that the ABC algorithm delivers a consistent global optimal solution for this optimization problem.