Post-Disaster-Aware Proactive Deployment of Aerial Base Stations for Resilient Cellular Networks

This paper proposes a novel proactive deployment framework for multiple aerial base stations (ABSs) to enhance the resilience of cellular networks against post-disaster disruptions. Unlike conventional approaches that optimize the ABS deployment separately for pre and post-disaster conditions, our proposed framework jointly optimizes the ABS deployment providing high-quality services continuously from predisaster to post-disaster environments. By formulating the joint optimization problem, our strategy maximizes the minimum user satisfaction before disasters and the user coverage after disasters. Our simulation results demonstrated that our strategy significantly outperformed the existing strategies by achieving the pre and post-disaster network performance while requiring only a marginal increase in the number of ABSs.