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

This paper proposes a positioning strategy for a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) airlifting wireless base stations driven by communication constraints. First, two schedulers that model the distribution of resources among users within a single cell are analyzed. Then, an UAV autonomous positioning strategy is developed, based on a fair distribution of the radio resources among all the users of all the cells in a given scenario, in such a way that the user bitrate is the same regardless the users’ distribution and spatial density. Moreover, two realistic constraints are added related to capacity of the backhaul link among the UAVs and the ground station: the bitrate delivered per UAV and the total backhaul bandwidth shared among all the UAVs. Additionally, an energy consumption model is considered to evaluate the efficiency and viability of the proposed strategy. Finally, numerical results in different scenarios are provided to assess both the schedulers performance and the proposed coordinated positioning strategy for the UAVs.