UAV-assisted edge infrastructure for challenged networks

Challenged Networks (CNs) are characterized by frequent varying network conditions and intermittent connectivity. In general, CNs emerge in different scenarios including the disaster and emergency situations when the traditional cellular infrastructure is dysfunctional or unavailable as well as in the undeserved areas such as rural and developing regions. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of a mobile edge infrastructure adopting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for CN scenarios. Specifically, we assume that the UAVs can host micro Base Stations (BSs) and edge computing resources, which can be dynamically moved over the zones where the terrestrial mobile network is not properly working. After presenting the proposed UAV-mounted edge architecture, we propose a simple model to evaluate the performance in terms of coverage to users. Our preliminary results show that the UAV-based mobile edge architecture can guarantee a good coverage to users, even if the number of traditional BSs that are not working correctly is large.