Traffic-Aware Adaptive Deployment for UAV-Aided Communication Networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be used as an aerial base station to provide rapid wireless connectivity to ground users. Given UAV's agility and mobility, a key problem is how to adapt UAV deployment to best cater to the instantaneous wireless traffic in a territory. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware adaptive UAV deployment scheme in a UAV-aided communication network, where the UAV initiated at the cell center adapts its displacement direction and distance to the spatial randomness of the Poisson distributed mobile users within its target cell. In each realization, the UAV chooses its displacement direction based on a simple majority rule, i.e., to fly to the sector that has the greatest number of users. To balance the service for the users in different sectors, we further optimize the UAV's displacement distance in the chosen sector to maximize the average throughput. We show that the optimal displacement distance under the proposed scheme decreases with the user density. Extensive simulations illustrate that the proposed adaptive deployment scheme outperforms the traditional non-adaptive scheme, where the performance gain is especially significant for small user density.