UAV-Aided Networks for Emergency Communications in Areas with Unevenly Distributed Users

Nowadays, daily human life is closely intertwined with various networks. When natural disasters or malicious attacks break out, the failure of communication infrastructure due to direct destruction or indirect impact tends to cause a massive outage of communications. Emergency communication networks play a significant role in rescue operations. Recently, a flexible and efficient solution has been provided for emergency communications using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By means of their excellent characteristics, UAVs, serving as aerial base stations (ABSs), can be rapidly deployed to temporarily rebuild a damaged communication network to restore the users’ connectivity. In this study, we investigate the use of UAVs as ABSs for an emergency communication scene where user equipment is unevenly distributed and the communication infrastructure has completely failed due to a severe disaster. Effective communication probability (ECP), which integrates throughput coverage and connectivity, is used to evaluate the performance of a communication network. Through simulations, we analyze communication improvements that can be obtained by the flexible deployment of ABSs. The results show a noticeable increase in ECP when some ABSs are deployed in optimal locations.