Efficient 3D Placement of Access Points in an Aerial Wireless Network

Abstract

Aerial deployment of access points (APs) to network infrastructure has been shown to be an effective technological solution for rapidly supplying networking services in diverse scenarios, particularly post-disaster networking after major hurricane, tsunami, and earthquake events, or for the purposes of homeland security. A straightforward yet helpful method for deployment of APs in this emerging technology is to consider the problem in two 2D planes, one for users and another for APs. However, considering the need for effectively connecting low-power user devices that may suffer from severe fading due to the blocking of line-of-sight(LoS) transmissions, genuine 3D deployment is very desirable, even though a simpler form of it had been mathematically an open problem until 2017 for 400 years. To meet the engineering requirements, we first leverage 3D random geometric graphs (RGG) to develop the joint optimization of 3D AP placement with a given number of APs for proper coverage. We further propose a computationally-efficient iterative algorithm to effectively deploy the adequate number of APs in 3D space and respond to dynamics of such wireless networks. Our simulations demonstrate the superior performance of this genuine 3D placement of APs over traditional approaches when considering connections for user devices, particularly for larger number of APs in rapid deployment.