QoS-Compliant 3-D Deployment Optimization Strategy for UAV Base Stations

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being integrated as an active element in 5G and beyond networks. Because of their flexibility and mobility, UAV base stations (UAV-BSs) can be deployed according to the ground user distributions and their quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. Although there has been quite some prior research on the UAV deployment, no work has studied this problem in a 3-D setting and taken into account the UAV-BS capacity limit and the QoS requirements of ground users. Therefore, in this article, we focus on the problem of deploying UAV-BSs to provide satisfactory wireless communication services, with the aim to maximize the total number of covered user equipment subject to user data-rate requirements and UAV-BSs' capacity limit. First, we model the relationship between the air-to-ground path loss (PL) and the location of UAV-BSs in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, which has not been considered in previous works. Unlike the conventional UAV deployment problem formulation, the 3-D deployment problem is decoupled into a 2-D horizontal placement and altitude determination connected by PL requirement and minimization. Then, we propose a novel genetic algorithm-based 2-D placement approach in which UAV-BSs are placed to have maximum coverage of the users with consideration of data rate distribution. Finally, numerical and simulation results show that the proposed approach has enabled a better coverage percentage comparing with other schemes.