Unmanned aerial vehicle positioning and user equipment power allocation

In the near future, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will have enormous potential applications for next generation wireless communication systems, in which they can collaborate to serve several user equipment (UE) for communication purposes.Disaster scenarios are a relevant research topic, in which UAVs can aid establishing connections in circumstances where base stations (BS) may be inoperative.The resulting UAV positioning affects the overall spectral efficiency (SE) in each UAV-UE link. Moreover, UEs energy consumption must be optimized since the finite amount of energy available is one of the most significant limitations of these devices. Therefore, it is essential to determine the lowest power consumption necessary to guarantee a minimum SE throughput in a disaster location.In this paper, we investigate a cooperative meta-heuristic (MH) optimization algorithm for both the UAVs and UEs. We propose two parallel optimization approaches: one is the UAV search position process to find the best possible location to serve its pre-allocated UEs; the other is finding the lowest possible uplink (UL) power values for each user’s equipment. The preliminary results show that the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm reaches good quality solutions in acceptable computation runtime.