Attack Resilient Wireless Backhaul Connectivity with Optimized Fronthaul Coverage in UAV Networks

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks emerge as a viable solution, offering wireless coverage for dispersed Internet of Things (IoT) devices in remote and disaster struck areas. However, the placement of the UAVs plays a crucial role in the performance and resilience of the network. The UAVs need to cover all the ground users whilst staying in close proximity to sustain cyber attacks and failures, which is a non-trivial optimization problem since the users may have arbitrary locations. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of UAV placement optimization by cost-effectively providing both coverage and connectivity for end-to-end communication of spatially dispersed ground users or IoT devices. Our proposed approach leverages a two-step optimization framework that splits the UAVs according to their role of providing coverage or connectivity. Sequential execution of the optimization is able to generate the placement solutions that concurrently satisfy the requirements of user coverage and connectivity with fixed amount of UAVs. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can achieve resilient UAV formations compared to related works in the literature and is adaptive and scalable to a variety of user locations.