Integrated Robotic Aerial Base Stations Deployment and Backhaul Design in 6G Multihop Networks

To overcome the limited endurance of traditional unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), we propose a network of robotic aerial base stations (RABSs) that can energy-efficiently anchor into tall urban landforms, such as lampposts. This approach enables the creation of a hyper-flexible wireless multi-hop network, designed to support green, densified, and dynamic network requirements, thereby ensuring reliable long-term coverage for the whole observed region. The proposed network infrastructure can concurrently address the backhaul link capacity bottleneck and support access link traffic demand in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency band. Specifically, the RABSs grasping locations, resource blocks (RBs) assignment, and route flow control are simultaneously optimized to maximize the served traffic demands. The group of RABSs capitalizes on the fact that traffic distribution varies considerably across both time and space within a given geographical area. Hence, they are able to relocate to suitable locations, i.e., ‘follow’ the traffic demand as it unfolds to increase the overall network efficiency. To tackle the curse of dimensionality of the proposed mixed-integer problem, we propose a greedy algorithm to obtain a competitive solution with low computational complexity. A wide set of numerical investigations reveals that RABSs could improve the served traffic demand. For instance, compared to networks with randomly deployed fixed small cells, the proposed mode serves at most 65% more traffic demand.