Deployment Strategies of Multiple Aerial BSs for User Coverage and Power Efficiency Maximization

Unmanned aerial vehicle-based aerial base stations (BSs) can provide rapid communication services to ground users and are thus promising for future communication systems. In this paper, we consider a scenario where no functional terrestrial BSs are available and the aim is deploying multiple aerial BSs to cover a maximum number of users within a certain target area. To this end, we first propose a naive successive deployment method, which converts the non-convex constraints in the involved optimization into a combination of linear constraints through geometrical relaxation. Then, we investigate a deployment method based on K-means clustering. The method divides the target area into K convex subareas, where within each subarea, a mixed integer non-linear problem is solved. An iterative power efficient technique is further proposed to improve coverage probability with reduced power. Finally, we propose a robust technique for compensating the loss of coverage probability in the existence of inaccurate user location information. Our simulation results show that the proposed techniques achieve an up to 30% higher coverage probability when users are not distributed uniformly. In addition, the proposed simultaneous deployment techniques, especially the one using iterative algorithm, improve power-efficiency by up to 15% compared with the benchmark circle packing theory.