Deployment of Energy-Efficient Aerial Communication Platforms With Low-Complexity Detection

Due to their flexibility, mobility and autonomy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are considered as a potential candidate to operate as flying base stations to provide a specific geographical area with air-to-ground wireless communications services. Besides, the limitation of the on-board energy motivates the design of a more energy-efficient way to transmit information. Moreover, the deployment of multiple UAVs can affect the quality of experience (QoE) of users. In this paper, we propose a method that combines the concept of index modulation (IM) with the UAV communications systems, which we refer to as IM-UAV, to attain an improved energy-efficiency (EE). Furthermore, based on the proposed IM-UAV communication system, a gradient descent based UAV deployment scheme is designed to maximize the downlink average rate of the ground users (GUs) in the target area. On the other hand, the maximum likelihood (ML) detection for the IM-UAV requires a high computational complexity for detection at the GUs, while providing the best possible performance. Hence, we propose a low-complexity detection scheme that can separately detect the index symbols and data symbols to reduce the computational complexity at the receiver side. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed deployment method is capable of attaining the appropriate positions to deploy the UAVs, while the EE is also improved by combining IM with UAV communication system. In addition, the proposed low-complexity detection scheme reduces the computation complexity by slightly sacrificing the bit error rate (BER) performance.