UAV placement games for optimal wireless service provision

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks have emerged as a promising technique to rapidly provide wireless services to a group of mobile users simultaneously in the three-dimensional (3D) geographical space, where a flying UAV facility can be deployed closely based on users' 3D location reports. The paper aims to address a challenging issue that each user is selfish and prefers the UAV to be located as close to himself as possible, by misreporting his location and changing the optimal UAV location. We study the social planner's problem to determine the final deployment location of a UAV facility in a 3D space, by ensuring all selfish users' truthfulness in reporting their locations. To minimize the social service cost in this UAV placement game, we design a strategyproof mechanism with approximation ratio 2, when comparing to the social optimum. On the other hand, as the UAV to be deployed may interfere with another group of incumbent users in the same space, we also study the obnoxious UAV placement game to maximally keep their social utility, where each incumbent user may misreport his location to keep the UAV away from him. We propose a strategyproof mechanism with approximation ratio 5. Besides the worst-case analysis, we further analyze the empirical performances of the proposed mechanisms and show that they converge to the social optimum as the number of users becomes large. Finally, we extend to the dual-preference UAV placement game by considering the coexistence of the two groups of users, where users can misreport both their locations and preference types. We successfully propose a strategyproof mechanism with approximation ratio 8.