Abstract

In this paper we study the deployment of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) network that consists of multiple UAVs to provide emergent communication service for people who are trapped in a disaster area, where each UAV is equipped with a base station that has limited computing capacity and power supply, and thus can only serve a limited number of people. Unlike most existing studies that focused on homogeneous UAVs, we consider the deployment of heterogeneous UAVs where different UAVs have different computing capacities. We study a problem of deploying K heterogeneous UAVs in the air to form a temporarily connected UAV network such that the network throughput-the number of users served by the UAVs, is maximized, subject to the constraint that the number of people served by each UAV is no greater than its service capacity. We then propose a novel O√s/K)-approximation algorithm for the problem, where s is a given positive integer with 1 ≤ s≤ K, e.g., s=3. We also devise an improved heuristic, based on the approximation algorithm. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Experimental results show that the numbers of users served by UAVs in the solutions delivered by the proposed algorithms are increased by 25% than state-of-the-arts.

Department(s)

Computer Science

Keywords and Phrases

approximation algorithms; heterogeneous UAVs; UAV communication networks; UAV deployment problem

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1558-2566; 1063-6692

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2024

Download

Full Text Link

Share

 
COinS