Joint User Association, Power Allocation and ABS Deployment Optimization in Air-Ground Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted air-ground cooperative network scheme to improve system throughput and enhance user fairness by deploying the UAV as aerial base station (ABS) to provide wireless services to cell-edge users. To take full advantage of this scheme, we propose a joint user association, power allocation, and ABS deployment optimization problem to achieve the minimum potential delay fairness. To solve the complex optimization problem, we design an alternating iterative scheme based on branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO), and use the k-mean algorithm to obtain the initial solution. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm further improves the network performance compared with other schemes.