UAV Deployment for Throughput Maximization in a UAV-Assisted Cellular Communications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) deployment as an aerial base station in fifth-generation (5G) communication system has emerged as a promising technology to provide seamless communication in a geographical region. The UAV’s high mobility potential offers additional degrees of freedom for effective deployment. Therefore, the three-dimensional (3D) deployment of UAV is one of the key challenges in UAV-assisted communication systems. In this paper, we address the problem of UAV deployment in 3D space to provide on-demand coverage to the ground users to maximize the sum rate. We consider realistic UAV-ground channel model derived from extensive experiments. The problem formulated is non-convex. To obtain the optimal location, we approximate the rate expression to identify the concave regions and propose a low-complexity solution by applying alternating optimization. Through simulation results, we provide valuable insights into the low-complexity solution.