An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based UAV selection mechanism for beyond 5G networks

In beyond 5G (B5G) network, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is considered as a promising solution to improve network coverage and satisfy the wide variety of service requirements. In B5G, mobile terminals (MTs) will be able to connect to UAVs flying in different altitudes and serving different classes of applications such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra reliable low latency communication (uRLLC) and security intensive applications such as security as a service (SaaS). It may be noted that UAVs in high altitude incur high power consumption, but reduced secrecy throughput and packet loss. In contrast, lower altitude UAVs incur high packet loss and secrecy throughput with reduced power consumption. Due to such trade-off and the fact that the traditional user association problem is NP hard, selecting an appropriate UAV to satisfy the user requirement is a computationally challenging task. In this work, an UAV selection mechanism has been proposed for UAV enabled B5G network based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) which essentially captures the aforementioned trade-off while associating the MTs with the UAVs. The proposed AHP selects the best UAV based on the application class. Simulation results show that the proposed UAV selection mechanism outperforms the existing best downlink (BD) based approach in terms of user throughput, secrecy throughput and packet loss rate.