QoS-aware 3D Deployment of UAV Base Stations

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations play a significant role in many scenarios like disaster relief and terrestrial traffic offloading. To put UAV base stations into operation, deployment is a key issue to be addressed. Existing works do not take into account different user Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in the deployment of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D deployment scheme which minimizes the number of UAVs to cover all users with different QoS requirements. First, we derive the relationship between the altitude and coverage of a UAV at different user QoS requirements. Then, we formulate the deployment problem on the basis of the relationship. Next, we propose a 3D UAV deployment algorithm which considers both altitude and horizontal location. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can deploy less UAVs to achieve full coverage of all users.