Cell on Wheels-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System for Providing Wireless Coverage in Emergency Situations

Abstract

Due to natural disasters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed as aerial wireless base stations when conventional cellular networks are out of service. They can also supplement the mobile ground station to provide wireless devices with improved coverage and faster data rates. Cells on wheels (CoWs) can also be utilized to provide enhanced wireless coverage for short-term demands. In this paper, a single CoW cooperates with a single UAV in order to provide maximum wireless coverage to ground users. The optimization problem is formulated to find the following: (1) the optimal 2D placement of the CoW, (2) the optimal 3D placement of the UAV, (3) the optimal bandwidth allocation, (4) the percentage of the available bandwidth that must be provided to the CoW and UAV, and (5) the priority of wireless coverage; which maximizes the number of covered users. We utilize the exhaustive search (ES) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms to solve the optimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is validated using simulation results.