On-demand UAV base station deployment for wireless service of crowded tourism areas

Abstract

With the support of wireless network, tourists in tourism areas could enjoy various tourism information search and smart tourism–related services. However, due to the limited capacity of wireless networks, in peaking seasons, tourism area crowding in local areas could result in emergency and temporary wireless network congestion. While increasing infrastructure investment (e.g., densifying base stations) is desiring for peak seasons, it can be a waste of resource for significantly shrunk tourist arrival in off seasons. In response to the temporary network congestion offloading demand, this paper proposes an on-demand coverage solution based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations. Firstly, taking the air-to-ground channel characteristic into account, we define the effective coverage radius, based on which the optimal altitude of UAV BS is derived. Then, to tackle the inherent challenge of irregular tourist distribution issue in tourism areas, an automatic UAV BS deployment algorithm is designed to determine the minimal number of UAV BSs and their two-dimensional coordinates simultaneously. Simulation results show that the proposed solution could realize efficient UAV BS on-demand deployment.