A Method for Optimized Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Maximum Coverage and Minimum Interference in Cellular Networks

Abstract

We focus on the problem of deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to service mobile users in a cellular network, with the aim of maximizing coverage and reducing interference effects. An optimization model that is distributed in nature is proposed and a maximizing algorithm is developed to find a locally optimal solution. The performance of this distributed algorithm is shown to be superior in quality and solution time to a standard greedy algorithm. Testing on a simulation of a practical scenario is performed to demonstrate the application of the method to real scenarios as well as to illustrate the tradeoff between maximizing coverage and minimizing interference.