3D Deployment of Multiple UAV-Mounted Base Stations for UAV Communications

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted lots of attention because of their high mobility and low cost. This article investigates a communication system assisted by multiple UAV-mounted base stations (BSs), aiming to minimize the number of required UAVs and to improve the coverage rate by optimizing the three-dimensional (3D) positions of UAVs, user clustering, and frequency band allocation. Compared with the existing works, the constraints of the required quality of service (QoS) and the service ability of each UAV are considered, which makes the problem more challenging. A three-step method is developed to solve the formulated mixed-integer programming problem. First, to ensure that each UAV can serve more number of users, the maximum service radius of UAVs is derived according to the required minimum power of the received signals for the users. Second, an algorithm based on artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed to minimize the number of required UAVs. Third, the 3D position and the frequency band of each UAV are designed to increase the power of the target signals and to reduce the interference. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution for UAV-assisted communication systems.