Deployment of UAV-mounted Access Points for VoWiFi Service with guaranteed QoS

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks have emerged as a promising means to provide wireless coverage in open geographical areas. Nevertheless, in wireless networks such as WiFi, signal coverage alone is insufficient to guarantee that network performance meets the quality of service (QoS) requiremen...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Mayor Gallego, Vicente Jesús, Estepa Alonso, Rafael María, Estepa Alonso, Antonio José, Madinabeitia Luque, Germán
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2022
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repository:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/138463
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/138463
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2022.06.037
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
Wireless LAN
Voice over IP (VoIP)
Quality of Service (QoS)
Description
Summary:Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks have emerged as a promising means to provide wireless coverage in open geographical areas. Nevertheless, in wireless networks such as WiFi, signal coverage alone is insufficient to guarantee that network performance meets the quality of service (QoS) requirements of real-time communication services, as it also depends on the traffic load produced by ground users sharing the medium access. We formulate a new problem for UAVs optimal deployment in which the QoS level is guaranteed for real-time voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) communications. More specifically, our goal is to dispatch the minimum number of UAVs possible to provide VoWiFi service to a set of ground users subject to coverage, call-blocking probability, and QoS constraints. Optimal solutions are found using well-known heuristics that include K-means clusterization and genetic algorithms. Via numerical results, we show that the WiFi standard revision (e.g. IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac) in use plays an important role in both coverage and QoS performance and hence, in the number of UAVs required to provide the service.