Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising solution to provide wireless data access for ground users in various applications (e.g., in emergency situations). This paper considers a UAV-enabled wireless network, in which multiple UAVs are deployed as aerial base stations to serve users distributed on the ground. Different from prior works that ignore UAVs’ backhaul connections, we practically consider that these UAVs are connected to the core network through a ground gateway node via rate-limited multi-hop wireless backhauls. We also consider that the air-to-ground access links from UAVs to users and the air-to-air backhaul links among UAVs are operated over orthogonal frequency bands. Under this setup, we aim to maximize the common (or minimum) throughput among all the ground users in the downlink of this network subject to the flow conservation constraints at the UAVs, by optimizing the UAVs’ deployment locations, jointly with the bandwidth and power allocation of both the access and backhaul links. However, the common throughput maximization is a non-convex optimization problem that is difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this issue, we use the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex programming to obtain a locally optimal solution. Numerical results show that the proposed design significantly improves the common throughput among all ground users as compared to other benchmark schemes.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61871137). The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was W. Zhang.
Peiming Li received his B.E. degree in information engineering from Guangdong University of Technology. He is now a postgraduate student with the School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology. His major is information and communication engineering. His current research interests include UAV communications and wireless communications.
Jie Xu [corresponding author] received his B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Science and Technology of China in 2007 and 2012, respectively. From 2012 to 2014, he was a research fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. From 2015 to 2016, he was a post-doctoral research fellow with the Engineering Systems and Design Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design. He is currently a professor with the School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, China. His research interests include energy efficiency and energy harvesting in wireless communications, wireless information and power transfer, wireless securities, UAV communications, and mobile edge computing. He was a recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award in 2017. He is currently an editor of the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, an associate editor of the IEEE Access, and a guest editor of the IEEE Wireless Communications. He is the workshop co-chair for two workshops in ICC 2018 and the 23rd Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications.
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Li, P., Xu, J. Placement Optimization for UAV-Enabled Wireless Networks with Multi-Hop Backhauls. J. Commun. Inf. Netw. 3, 64–73 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0040-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0040-3