Fairness-Aware Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Mounted Base Station Placement with Quality of Service Provisioning

Unmanned aerial vehicle-mounted base stations (UAV-BS) have the potential to revolutionize sixth-generation (6G) networks and beyond. Their ability to traverse virtually any terrain allows them to be positioned in the air to provide coverage and connectivity to nearby users. However, determining the UAV-BS’s optimal positions is challenging, as several factors must be considered, including quality of service (QoS), collision avoidance, and fair QoS provisioning for efficient usage of UAV-BS’s limited transmit power. Thus, we propose a fairness-aware three-dimensional multi-UAV-BS placement scheme based on the artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA). First, we formulate a joint UAV-BS and user association problem to maximize a proportional fairness utility function, subject to collision avoidance and user QoS requirements. Next, we develop a joint UAV-BS placement and user association scheme using the AHA and greedy algorithm. Results show that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms existing baseline schemes in blocking probability, Jain’s fairness index and data rate.