Mobility-Aware Federated Learning-Based Proactive UAVs Placement in Emerging Cellular Networks

With the vast proliferation of smart mobile devices, there is an ever-increasing demand for higher data rates and seamless connectivity throughout. Current 5th generation and beyond (B5G) cellular networks struggle to eradicate outage zones and ensure seamless connectivity. One promising solution to this problem is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the traditional ground network and provide connectivity in places where there are no small base stations or faulty ones as a result of some natural disasters such as flooding. In this paper, we propose a novel users’ mobility-aware & users’ demand-aware federated learning-based proactive UAV placement (MFPUP) framework to assist the existing ground communication network and minimise overall network outages. Our MFPUP framework utilises the federated learning-based mobility prediction model that recommends the potential outage areas to deploy UAVs using user-UAV association techniques such as the optimum association approach (OAP) and the greedy association approach (GAP). In order to validate the performance of the proposed MFPUP scheme we carried out extensive simulations. The proposed LSTM-based mobility model outperforms the DNN model with 92.88% prediction accuracy. Further, our results show that the proposed MFPUP framework associates the optimal number of users to UAVs while also improving 1.25 times users’ downlink rates as compared other UAVs placement schemes.