UAV-fleet management for extended NextG emergency support infrastructure with QoS and cost aware

Abstract

The recent developments in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-assisted wireless communications demonstrated the valuable contributions UAVs could offer to support communication infrastructures under duress. However, due to the complicated and costly operation management, the use of UAVs was extremely limited to fixed pre-arranged deployment or short-term ad-hoc service support. Unfortunately, fixed deployments are not suitable for emergencies such as unexpected failures or overhead; a situation ad-hoc deployment would serve much better. The main obstacle facing ad-hoc deployment models is the increased cost of operation and complicated power management. This paper presents a reliable self and mission-aware multi-hop UAV operation management to support communication networks in case of infrastructure failure or overload for extended time and distances. The formalized optimization offers a solution to the operation management challenges for ad-hoc UAV deployment as a balanced multi-objective, multi-dimensional convex-optimization problem. The paper also provides the pre-flying numerical analysis and parameters to enable optimal mission-oriented extension coverage as a solution guiding the presented UAV operation management framework. The optimization problem is simulated for a 5G-sub 6 cellular network to assess the proposed framework’s efficiency and effectiveness in a coverage extension situation. Results showed that the proposed framework could facilitate extended flight time, overlay network support, and stable service provisioning.