Mobility-Aware UAV Placement and Route Optimization for MANETs

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively utilized to provide wireless connectivity in infrastructure-free areas, enhance network capacity and provide support for peaks or unexpected surges in user demand, mainly due to their fast deployment, cost-efficiency and superior communication performance resulting from Line of Site (LoS)-dominated channels. In order to exploit the benefits of UAVs as base stations or relays in a mobile ad hoc network, a major challenge is to determine the optimal UAV placement and relocation strategy with respect to the mobility and traffic patterns of the ground network nodes. Moreover, considering that the UAVs form a multi-hop aerial network, capacity and connectivity constraints have significant impacts on the end-to-end network performance. To this end, we formulate the joint UAV placement and routing problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and propose an LP rounding algorithm that achieves a balance between time-complexity and optimality.