A Service-Constrained Positioning Strategy for an Autonomous Fleet of Airborne Base Stations

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication
• Robotics and Automation
• Network Engineering

Background:

• Wireless base stations are crucial for mobile communication.
• Deploying base stations in remote or temporary locations presents challenges.
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a flexible platform for mobile infrastructure.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an autonomous positioning strategy for a fleet of UAVs airlifting wireless base stations.
• To ensure fair radio resource distribution and uniform user bitrate across all users and cells.
• To evaluate the strategy's performance under realistic communication and energy constraints.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of two resource distribution schedulers for single-cell scenarios.
• Development of a coordinated UAV autonomous positioning strategy.
• Incorporation of backhaul link capacity constraints (per UAV bitrate and total bandwidth).
• Integration of an energy consumption model for efficiency assessment.

Main Results:

• The proposed strategy ensures equal user bitrate irrespective of user distribution and spatial density.
• Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the coordinated positioning strategy.
• Performance assessment of schedulers and the positioning strategy across various scenarios.

Conclusions:

• The developed UAV positioning strategy effectively addresses communication constraints for aerial base stations.
• The strategy promotes fair resource allocation and consistent user experience.
• The approach is viable and efficient, considering backhaul and energy consumption.