Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Post-Disaster Communication Networks

The overall efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) must be reliable when providing wireless coverage service during and post-disaster scenarios. UAVs should be able to provide wireless services to ground user devices, and extend the coverage to user devices that are out of coverage, through device-to-device communication. In this work, the UAV was proposed to achieve reliable connectivity with improved energy efficiency in terms of the propagation gain in post-disasters scenarios. The numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of UAV system capacity with different path loss exponents for reliable connectivity to ground user devices. The UAV was integrated with the cellular system and device-to-device to transfer wireless service through post-disaster events.