Power-Aware 3D UAV Placement for IoT Emergency Communications

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used for rapid and easy deployment to provide cellular coverage in emergency cases. This paper considers a wireless-enabled UAV used as a relay to provide coverage for IoT devices in case of emergency communications, and then it transmits data to the nearest base station. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to find an efficient 3D placement of the UAV. The optimization problem is formulated to minimize the transmitted power and reduce the outage probability for the optimum 3D placement of the UAV, taking into consideration the traffic requirements of each IoT device. The design of the proposed algorithm minimizes the power of both links: ground-to-air (G2A) link and air-to-ground (A2G) link. The numerical results are presented showing that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the transmitted power with very low complexity.