Optimizing mmWave UAV Networks: Mobility-Aware Deployment and Resource Allocation

Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as small airborne base stations is gradually becoming a research hotspot in the field of wireless communications. With the flexible deployment, wide coverage and low cost, UAV communications show great potential in the fields of emergency rescue, environmental monitoring and military operations. In particular, the easier availability of line-of-sight (LOS) links for UAVs makes its combination with millimetre wave (mmWave) technology significantly enhance the communication bandwidth and data transfer rate. However, the very limited coverage of mmWave communications greatly affects the actual data rates provided by small aerial base stations of mmWave UAVs, especially considering user movement on the ground. In this paper, we study the joint optimisation problem of UAV deployment, user association, spectrum resource allocation in millimetre-wave heterogeneous networks, and explore the impact of different user movement models on system performance. Given that this problem is NP-hard, our paper proposes an MCR-SAC method to maximize the network’s total throughput. Simulation results demonstrate an average 18% improvement in total transmission rate compared to the conventional.