Coverage-maximization and Energy-efficient Drone Small Cell Deployment in Aerial-Ground Collaborative Vehicular Networks

Deployment positions and energy efficiency optimization for drone small cells (DSCs) are two promising techniques to enhance the coverage capability and prolong the operational time of DSCs in aerial-ground collaborative vehicular networks. Generally, it is necessary to determine the number of DSCs that need to deploy at the lowest cost with the maximum non-overlapping coverage. In this paper, a coverage-maximization and energy-efficient DSC deployment scheme is proposed to deploy a certain number of DSCs in the target area, which is based on the circle packing theory and the UAV energy consumption model. The proposed scheme deploys the DSCs to maximize the communication coverage and minimize the energy consumption jointly by considering the DSC altitude, energy consumption model, communication quality, and connectivity. The results show that according to the different proportion of coverage and energy consumption of DSCs, we can determine the deployment number and positions of DSCs. The proposed deployment method can achieve the largest non-overlapping coverage with different DSCs numbers while ensuring the quality of aerial-ground communications.