Distributed Deployment of Aerial Base Stations with RF Energy Harvesting

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted aerial base station (ABS) is considered as a promising technology to enhance the capacity and coverage in future mobile networks. However, determining the optimal placement of ABSs that maximizes the overall communication quality of users is a challenging problem because of complicated air-to-ground channel characteristics and inter-cell interference. Moreover, ABSs are faced with the problem of limited available power resources. In this study, we consider an ABS network in which ABSs perform radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting from terrestrial base stations and propose a novel distributed ABS deployment method that optimizes the performance of the energy harvesting and downlink transmission jointly. In our method, each ABS updates its position by using local information only and communicating with its neighboring ABSs; thus, the overhead of information gathering is smaller than that in the centralized method. Simulation results demonstrate that our method improves both the energy harvesting and communication quality of users.