Efficient 3D Placement of UAVs with QoS assurance in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

International audienceIn this work, we consider a wireless communication system consisting of multiple rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used as aerial base stations (ABSs) in order to provide downlink connectivity to the user terminals (UEs) on the ground. Towards investigating power efficient deployment strategies for such a system, the contribution of this article is twofold: we formalize the relevant multi-objective optimization problem, and secondly develop Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based techniques for optimization of the individual objectives, which are then exploited in an iterative manner. The relevant optimization objectives for reducing the total power consumed are the number of base stations (BSs) and their transmit powers. The optimization is performed while assuring minimum quality-of-service constraints (QoSs) such as per-user coverage probability and per-user rate. Through system level simulations, we show that the developed approach ensures great reductions for both the number of base stations as well as their individual transmit power, thus saving initial deployment cost as well as reducing operational costs induced due to energy consumption