A Distributed Approach for User Association and UAV Deployment in QoE-Aware Multi-UAV Networks

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (BSs) has gained increasing attention recently. In this paper, we investigate the problems of ground user (GU) association and UAV-BS deployment in a multi-UAV assisted wireless network using a distributed approach, aiming to maximize the total quality of experience (QoE) of GUs. Since the two problems are coupled to each other, we adopt an alternating optimization approach to optimize the GU association and UAV-BS deployment alternately. We model the GU association problem as a coalition formation game (CFG), and a distributed algorithm based on switch rule and swap rule is proposed to solve the stable coalition partition of the GU association CFG. Besides, we propose a distributed algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the deployment position of each UAV-BS. The proposed algorithms can run online on UAV-BSs in a distributed manner. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through simulation experiments. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve a high total QoE of GUs in limited number of iterations.