Voronoi Tesselation-based load-balanced multi-objective priority-based heuristic optimisation for multi-cell region coverage with UAVs

Abstract

The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile base stations (BSs) for urgent temporal communication and infrastructure offloading has been proposed as an efficient and economic solution in many studies. Our work is focused on the optimisation of the region coverage with UAVs in such cases. The proposed multi-objective priority-based optimisation framework utilises an evolutionary heuristic algorithm with a custom-designed scoring scheme to achieve this task. Voronoi Tesselation of the region, based on the existing nearby BSs, is proposed for better signal reception and for load balancing the data rate. The proposed framework, besides maximising the coverage, considers minimising overlapping regions between UAVs, minimising overflowing regions (coverage outside of the region) for the UAVs, and flight distance of the UAVs from/to the BS. Depending on the requirements of the coverage scenario, one or more objectives can be prioritised or can be ignored over the others.