SIDE: Semi-Distributed Mechanical Equilibrium Based UAV Deployment

Abstract

Recently, we have seen the unprecedented development in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from different aspects. Accordingly, an increasing number of applications have emerged based on UAVs. Among which, placing UAVs as Aerial Base Stations (ABSs) has received considerable interest in both the industrial and academic community. Existing solutions focus on the optimization of the UAV deployment problem for static user topology using the control information obtained from the Terrestrial Base Station (TBS), that makes hard for the controller to make real-time decisions. To break this stalemate, we propose a SemI-DistributEd system, named SIDE, for the UAV self-deployment. In SIDE, we introduce a mechanical equilibrium based approach, named EMech, via which the UAV positions are self-adapted according to users' attraction (e.g., user distance and traffic demand) within their transmission range. To facilitate the EMech, we propose a fine-grained area splitting strategy, termed KDivision, that partitions the service area in accordance with the user density. Finally, an area merging technique, namely RMerge, is exploited to approximately optimize the positions of the UAVs assisted by an Utility Function that strikes a balance amid the network performance and economic cost. We conduct field experiments to validate the feasibility of EMech. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed SIDE finds the optimal number of assigned UAVs, which not only reduces the cost of the system significantly, but also improves the achievable rate up to 74.6% compared to the existing solutions while consuming almost the same energy level.