Coverage Maximization for Heterogeneous Aerial Networks

In this letter, we investigate the network planning of the heterogeneous aerial networks to maximize the network coverage. Specifically, a joint high-altitude aerial base station (HABS) trajectory and low-altitude aerial base station (LABS) position optimization problem is formulated with the objective to maximize the number of covered users. Based on the feature of the air-to-ground channel, we first obtain the optimal altitude of the LABSs through the bisection method. Then, we propose a joint particle-and-fish swarm algorithm to optimize the horizontal position of the LABS. For the uncovered users, we model the user coverage probability in the HABS and devise a random interval contraction based algorithm to optimize the flying radius of the HABS. Simulation results indicate that our algorithms can fully exploit the mobility of the heterogeneous aerial networks to cover more users.