Positioning of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Stations in Future Wireless Network

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations (BSs) are reliable and efficient alternative to full fill the coverage and capacity requirements when the backbone network fails to provide such requirements due to disasters. In this paper, we consider optimal UAV-deployment problem in 3D space for a mmWave network. The objective is to deploy multiple aerial BSs simultaneously to completely serve the ground users. We develop a novel algorithm to find the feasible positions for a set of UAV-BSs from a predefined set of locations, subject to a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint of every associated user, UAV-BS’s limited hovering altitude constraint and restricted operating zone constraint. We cast this 3D positioning problem as an ℓ ₀ minimization problem. This is a combinatorial, NP-hard problem. We approximate the ℓ ₀ minimization problem as non-combinatorial ℓ ₁ -norm problem. Therefore, we provide a suboptimal algorithm to find a set of feasible locations for the UAV-BSs to operate. The analysis shows that the proposed algorithm achieves a set of the location to deploy multiple UVABSs simultaneously while satisfying the constraints.