Energy-Efficient Network Slicing for UAV-enabled Networks

This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled network slicing problem to provide content delivery and sensing data gathering services. Two tenants provide services to their clients by sharing a common infrastructure of a set of UAVs. The content delivery tenant needs to guarantee that each of its clients (users) receives the required content, while the sensing tenant aims to gather an adequate amount of uncorrelated data. An energy consumption minimization framework is considered to meet the tenants’ requirements by optimizing the number of deployed UAVs, the deployment location of each UAV, the transmit power of each deployed UAV, and the user-UAV association. Taking into consideration the spatial correlation among the sensing users, a subset of these users is activated to gather the required sensing information. A heuristic solution approach is presented to select the suitable deployment location of the UAVs, activate the optimum subset of the sensing users, and associate the users of both tenants with the deployed UAVs. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces the total energy consumption.