Power Allocation and 3-D Placement for Floating Relay Supporting Indoor Communications

With the rapid development of mobile Internet and urban constructions, high-volume and dynamic indoor communications bring challenges to cellular systems. High penetration loss and deep shadowing channels of indoor users may substantially degrade the transmission efficiency and system throughput. To address this issue, this paper proposes a solution using Floating Relay (FR) given the mature technologies of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We target the undesirable channel conditions of indoor users, introduce the FR into the cellular system to improve transmission efficiency and maximize system throughput. Considering the capacity limit of the FR's back-haul link and the maximum transmission power of each user, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system throughput. The optimal power allocation strategy is then obtained for each user, and two effective online 3-D placement algorithms are proposed for the FR to approach the optimal location in the unpredictable and predictable scenarios, respectively. Extensive simulations are conducted. The achieved maximum system throughput, convergence rate, and accumulated throughput are used to evaluate the proposed algorithms. According to the comparisons between the two proposed algorithms and with off-line schemes, they show superiorities in their targeted scenarios, respectively.