Ahmed Ashfaq, Awais Muhammad, Akram Tallha, Kulac Selman, Alhussein Musaed, Aurangzeb Khursheed
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Campus, Wah Cantt 47040, Pakistan.
Department of Electrical-Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Duzce University, Konuralp, Duzce 81620, Turkey.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 May 9;19(9):2157. doi: 10.3390/s19092157.
Drone base stations (DBSs) have received significant research interest in recent years. They provide a flexible and cost-effective solution to improve the coverage, connectivity, quality of service (QoS), and energy efficiency of large-area Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, as DBSs are costly and power-limited devices, they require an efficient scheme for their deployment in practical networks. This work proposes a realistic mathematical model for the joint optimization problem of DBS placement and IoT users' assignment in a massive IoT network scenario. The optimization goal is to maximize the connectivity of IoT users by utilizing the minimum number of DBS, while satisfying practical network constraints. Such an optimization problem is NP-hard, and the optimal solution has a complexity exponential to the number of DBSs and IoT users in the network. Furthermore, this work also proposes a linearization scheme and a low-complexity heuristic to solve the problem in polynomial time. The simulations are performed for a number of network scenarios, and demonstrate that the proposed heuristic is numerically accurate and performs close to the optimal solution.
近年来，无人机基站（DBS）受到了广泛的研究关注。它们为改善大面积物联网（IoT）网络的覆盖范围、连通性、服务质量（QoS）和能源效率提供了一种灵活且经济高效的解决方案。然而，由于无人机基站是成本高昂且功率受限的设备，在实际网络中需要一种高效的部署方案。这项工作针对大规模物联网网络场景下无人机基站放置和物联网用户分配的联合优化问题提出了一个现实的数学模型。优化目标是通过使用最少数量的无人机基站来最大化物联网用户的连通性，同时满足实际网络约束。这样的优化问题是NP难问题，最优解的复杂度与网络中无人机基站和物联网用户的数量呈指数关系。此外，这项工作还提出了一种线性化方案和一种低复杂度启发式算法，以在多项式时间内解决该问题。针对多种网络场景进行了仿真，结果表明所提出的启发式算法在数值上是准确的，并且性能接近最优解。
