Qos-aware Multilayer uav deployment to Provide VoWiFi Service over 5g networks

Hindawi
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Volume 2022, Article ID 3110572, 13 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/3110572


Research Article
QoS-Aware Multilayer UAV Deployment to Provide VoWiFi Service over 5G Networks

Vicente Mayor , Rafael Estepa , and Antonio Estepa

Department of Telematics Engineering, Escuela Superior de Ingenieros, Universidad de Sevilla, C/Camino de los Descubrimientos s/ n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain
Correspondence should be addressed to Vicente Mayor; [e-mail]

Received 15 October 2021; Revised 20 December 2021; Accepted 3 January 2022; Published 28 January 2022

Academic Editor: Nagendra Kumar

Copyright © 2022 Vicente Mayor et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Drones equipped with wireless network cards can provide communication services in open areas. This paper proposes a hierarchical two-layered network architecture with two types of drones according to their communication equipment: Access and Distribution. While access drones provide WiFi access to ground users, distribution drones act as WiFi-to-5G relay forwarding packets into the 5G Core Network. In this context, we formulate a novel optimization problem for the 3-D initial placement of drones to provide Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) service to ground users. Our optimization problem finds the minimum number of drones (and their type and location) to be deployed constrained to coverage and minimum voice speech quality. We have used a well-known metaheuristic algorithm (Particle Swarm Optimization) to solve our problem, examining the results obtained for different terrain sizes (from 25m × 25m to 100m × 100m) and ground users (from 10 to 100). In the most demanding case, we were able to provide VoWiFi service with four distribution drones and five access drones. Our results show that the overall number of UAVs deployed grows with the terrain size (i.e., with users’ sparsity) and the number of ground users.