3D Drone-cell deployment optimization for drone assisted radio access networks

Drone-cell can enhance both the capacity and the coverage of Radio Access Networks (RAN) through relaying data between base stations and potential users. In this paper, we investigate the 3D spatial deployment problem of drone-cell in Drone Assisted Radio Access Networks (DA-RAN), and propose a solution based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. According to the drone-to-ground channel model, we formulate the drone-cell deployment problem with the objective to maximize coverage ratio of necessary users, while maintaining the link qualities between drone-cells and RAN. We design the per-Drone Iterated PSO (DI-PSO) algorithm to find the optimized deployments corresponding to different number of drone-cells. Simulation results show that the drone-cell deployments generated by the DI-PSO algorithm can improve RAN connectivity, and achieve higher coverage ratio when compared with the pure PSO based approach.