UAV and SWIPT Assisted Disaster Aware Clustering and Association

In an event of a disaster, the connectivity of on-scene available User Equipment (UE) to the first responders is important because of the unavailability of conventional networks. Therefore, in this paper, considering the deployment of both the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Mobile Command Center (MCC), we investigate end to end connectivity of UEs to the MCC in terms of the outage. Specifically, various disaster aware clustering schemes are proposed that utilize the UAV and MCC position for the association. These schemes include multiple degrees of freedom to manage intra-cluster distances along with the flexibility to restructure the clusters. In addition, we assume the provision of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) at Cluster Heads (CHs) through the UAV and MCC. The results show that the association of a UE to MCC or UAV prior to clustering can be optimized to achieve better performance. Without SWIPT at CH, the minimum distance metric to the UAV provides less outage. However, with SWIPT a weighted compromise between intra-cluster distance and CH distance to the UAV achieves less outage. We applied our proposed methods on a real man-made disaster scenario layout and determined their efficacy.