A Cooperative Drone Assisted Mobile Access Network for Disaster Emergency Communications

Abstract

Multiple drone-mounted base stations (DBSs) are used to be deployed over a disaster struck area to help mobile users (MUs) communicate with working BSs, which are located beyond the disaster-struck area. DBSs are considered as relay nodes between MUs and working BSs. In order to relax the bottleneck in wireless backhaul links, we propose a cooperative drone assisted mobile access network architecture by enabling DBSs (whose backhaul links are congested) to offload their traffic to other DBSs (whose backhaul links are not congested) via DBS-to-DBS communications. We formulate the DBS placement and channel allocation problem in the context of the cooperative drone assisted mobile access network architecture, and design a COoperative DBS plAcement and CHannel allocation (COACH) algorithm to solve the problem. The performance of COACH is demonstrated via extensive simulations.