3D UAV Deployment in Multi-UAV Networks With Statistical User Position Information

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) carried base stations can provide on-demand deployment for ground users. Given a target area to be serviced, this letter proposes a three-dimensional (3D) deployment method for multiple UAVs based on the knowledge of statistical user position information to maximize the total network throughput. The 3D deployment problem is divided into horizontal deployment problem and vertical deployment problem. Specifically, a virtual force field is built based on the statistical user distributions to help model the communication demand of users. Based on that, the horizontal placement scheme for each UAV is obtained by calculating the force balance points in the virtual field. The classical particle swarm optimization algorithm is adopted to determine the vertical coordinates of UAVs. In order to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm, we also evaluate it through comparison with benchmark algorithms on a real-world telecommunication dataset. Experimental results show that the throughput performance can be improved by the proposed method compared with those benchmark schemes.