Optimized 3D Drone Placement and Resource Allocation for LTE-Based M2M Communications

The deployment of drone-mounted communication systems has received increasing interest and attention recently as it allows significant improvement to the network access capacity and coverage. Many applications can benefit from such deployments in particular machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. In this study, we propose a technique for the rapid deployment of an LTE drone-mounted base station to serve a group of machine-type-communication devices (MTCDs) that are deployed in disaster situations or within remote applications. The objective is to maximize the number of served MTCDs while meeting their transmission delay requirements. This results in optimizing the 3D placement of the drone base station as well as the allocation of the available communication resources. We evaluated the proposed technique through several simulation experiments. The simulation results demonstrate significant improvement in the aggregate system throughput and the overall system deadline missing performance along with the increased number of served MTCDs compared to other drone placement approaches.