Service Time Optimization for UAV Aerial Base Station Deployment

Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide reliable and effective wireless communication services for ground users has become a promising solution in emergency scenarios. However, energy consumption limitations lead to new challenges to timeliness of UAV communications. In this article, we propose a service time optimization strategy using UAV as an aerial base station. Total service time of UAV, including hover time and flight time, is minimized while satisfying user load demand. First, the K-means algorithm is used to complete area division. Under the constraints of UAV coverage and transmit power, hover positions of UAV in each partition are optimized to obtain the shortest hover time. Subsequently, the shortest flight time is obtained by solving the traveling salesman problem. Finally, the above process is integrated into a complete service time optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy successfully achieves full-area coverage with the shortest service time, which significantly outperforms other existing algorithms, and there exists an optimal altitude to minimize the total service time.