Emergency UAV deployment optimization in an integrated air-ground network with joint communication and localization service

To exploite reusing a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to simultaneously act as an aerial base station and anchor point to assist the terrestrial emergency network, a novel integrated air-ground emergency support network was built with joint communication and localization service. The UAV position deployment optimization problem in the integrated network was studied, with a focus on resolving the fundamental and conflicting impacts of UAV deployment to the communication and localization performance. Firstly, a D-optimality based localization accuracy metric was adopted to replace the conventional Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB), and a UAV deployment optimization problem that maximizes the network throughput was formulated under individual localization accuracy and communication rate constraints. The closed-form expression of feasible deployment region of a UAV was derived that could satisfy the localization accuracy requirements of ground user, which was shown to be a second-order cone with the target user being the vertex, and proposed efficient deployment algorithm accordingly. Then, a 3D city map assisted deployment scheme was proposed to address the inaccurate air-ground channel modeling problems. The proposed deployment method is analytically tractable for deriving the optimal deployment solution, and has intuitive geometric structure to facilitate fast and performance-guaranteed deployment of integrated air-ground networks to satisfy the communication and localization performance requirements of ground users.