Deployment Strategies for a Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Wireless voice and data communications have become an essential part of our day to day lives. The current infrastructure is mainly consists of cellular towers with gateways to the telecommunication backbone. The wireless infrastructure is doing an adequate job of providing voice and data services, getting more powerful and efficient every day. However, because wireless infrastructure is mainly based on fixed cell towers, it lacks the flexibility and dynamism that may be needed in several scenarios. The emergence of UASs to be used in many applications provides a solution to add dynamism and flexibility to the current wireless infrastructure. In this publication we define an optimization problem where for a given set of UAVs and a given area to provide service for, we answer the question of how to deploy each UAV such that we have maximum possible coverage. The idea of having a population map as an input to our optimization problem and several sub-optimal solutions for the optimization problem are discussed, simulated and compared. We also consider the changes applying the same approaches to large areas and introduce the concept of reconfiguration as an important part of the system.