On the Prospect of UAV-assisted Communications Paradigm in Public Safety Networks

Modern models for Public Safety Networks (PSNs) utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) acting as ad-hoc base stations and complementing the Macro Base Station (MBS) to support the ground users' efficient and undisturbed communication. In this paper, we introduce a holistic and realistic framework that dynamically enables the ground users to invest their transmission power in an autonomous manner either in the UAV-based and/or MBS-based communication, while accounting for their Quality of Service (QoS) prerequisites and risk preferences. The UAV-based communication is characterized by limited available bandwidth, but close distance among the users and the UAV, thus resulting in users' low transmission powers and high achievable data rate, if properly utilized. In our work, the UAV's bandwidth is treated as a Common Pool of Resources (CPR), which can be exploited by all the users residing in the disaster area. However, the latter comes at the expense of resource fragility and potential failure from over-exploitation, due to its fully shared nature and excessive competition among the users. In contrast, the MBS due to its inherent characteristics acts as a safe resource, providing a guaranteed perceived satisfaction to the users based on their transmission power investment. Considering ground users' diverse behavioral patterns, when probabilistic uncertainty of the UAV's shared bandwidth is introduced, we model the ground users' power control problem under the principles of Prospect Theory. The formulated resource orchestration problem is solved as a Fragile CPR game and its convergence to a unique Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE) point is proven. A distributed low-complexity algorithm that converges to the unique PNE is devised, while the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through modeling and simulation.