Throughput maximization for UAV-assisted networks in emergency scenarios

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have widely sprouted up as a potential application because of their high degree of mobility, adaptability and availability for deployment on-demand. Considering that the ground base stations (BSs) may be damaged in emergency situations such as natural disasters, resulting in the failure to serve ground users (GUs), this paper explores a UAV acting as an aerial BS to offer service to GUs. Maximizing the minimum throughput of GUs is selected as our aim in order to guarantee user fairness, and an optimization problem is subsequently formulated. For dealing with the non-convexity of the problem, we put forward a high-efficiency of algorithm by utilizing block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex optimization (SCA) techniques for an effective solution. In comparison to other benchmark schemes, simulation results demonstrate that our design yields a considerable gain in throughput.