Deployment Algorithms of Flying Base Stations: 5G and Beyond With UAVs

Exploiting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations (BSs) to assist the terrestrial cellular networks is promising in 5G and beyond. Despite the inherent potentials, one challenging problem is how to optimally deploy multiple UAVs to achieve on-demand coverage for ground user equipment (UE). In this article, we model the deployment problem as minimizing the number of UAVs and maximizing the load balance among them, which is subject to two main constraints, i.e., UAVs should form a robust backbone network and they should keep connected with the fixed BSs. To solve this optimization problem with low complexity, we decompose the problem into two subproblems and propose a hybrid algorithm to solve them stepwise. First, a centralized greedy search algorithm is used to heuristically obtain the minimum number of UAVs and their suboptimal positions in a discontinuous space. Then, a distributed motion algorithm is adopted which enables each UAV to autonomously control its motion toward the optimal position in a continuous space. The proposed algorithm is applicable to various scenarios where UAVs are deployed alone or with fixed BSs regardless of the UE distribution. Extensive simulations validate the proposed algorithm.