3-D Placement of UAVs Based on SIR-Measured PSO Algorithm

This work studies the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as emergency access points to provide wireless services to users in a green field. Specifically, three fundamental design issues are explored under practical 3D air-to-ground (ATG) channel models, namely the minimum number of UAVs, their optimal deployment locations and the optimal transmit power allocation. To decouple these design goals, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based scheme in conjunction with the balanced Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) transmit power allocation is proposed. Exploiting the closed-form expressions of the SINR-balanced optimal power allocation and the resulting SINR, the proposed PSO-based scheme optimizes the UAV location generation by generation. Furthermore, a K-means clustering-based initialization scheme is developed to improve the performance of the proposed PSO-based scheme. Finally, a power fine-tuning scheme is devised to further reduce the total transmit power. Extensive simulation is performed to confirm the good performance of the proposed scheme.