Reducing Energy Consumed by Repositioning of Flying Base Stations Serving Mobile Users

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), acting as flying base stations (FlyBSs), are seen as a promising solution for future mobile networks, as the FlyBSs can serve space and time varying heterogeneous traffic in areas where deployment of conventional static base stations is uneconomical or infeasible. However, an energy consumption of the FlyBSs is a critical issue. In this paper, we target a scenario where the FlyBSs serve slowly moving users, e.g., visitors of an outdoor music festival or a performance. In such scenario, rotary-wing FlyBSs are not efficient due to a high energy consumption while not moving (given by an effect of a “helicopter” dynamics). Hence, we consider small airships or balloons. We develop a closed-form solution that determines new positions of the FlyBSs so that the energy consumption for a movement of the FlyBSs is reduced significantly (by 45–94% depending on the number of deployed FlyBSs) while sum capacity of the users is decreased only marginally (less than 1% for before-mentioned energy savings). Moreover, the proposed solution does not require any prediction of users’ movement, thus, it is not affected by the prediction error or uncertainty of the users’ behavior.