Fairness-aware placement of multiple aerial base stations in wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the joint placement of aerial Base Stations (BSs) and power control of BSs and users’ association to maximize the sum of the receive rates of end users. We formulate this problem as a mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem and propose a heuristic algorithm based on clustering. The algorithm focuses on a set of users with the lowest rates and clusters them into k groups. The centroid of each group is considered as a candidate for the initial placement of an aerial BS. The optimization loop starts by locating an aerial BS and then proceeds to three subalgorithms: updating power control, users’ association update, and aerial BS location. The results show that adding a single aerial BS improves the average user rate by approximately 18%, while reducing the total transmission power by 44%. Moreover, our proposed algorithm outperforms baseline PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) schemes in terms of average user rate.