Range-Based Reactive Deployment of Autonomous Drones for Optimal Coverage in Disaster Areas

This article studies deploying autonomous drones to provide Internet service to affected users in disaster areas. Specifically, the problem of minimizing the average drone-user distance is considered. Unlike some existing location-based approaches, a range-based reactive drone deployment algorithm is proposed. Instead of assuming that the users' locations are known, the proposed algorithm only requires the drones to measure the received signal strength and to share such information with other nearby drones. It is decentralized and easily implementable in real time. The algorithm's convergence is proved and its performance is validated by simulations and comparisons with a benchmark scheme.