UC Irvine

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a promising technology to solve many new challenging problems. It provides high maneuverability and control, low manufacturing cost with respect to other flying technologies and many other features. In particular, there is an increasing interest in UAVs in the field of wireless communications, due to their capacity to carry on transceivers and establish communication among UAVs, or between UAVs and ground base stations/users. In this work, we investigate a UAV deployment in which each flying vehicle serves a set of users, carrying directional antennas. To do so, we maximize the minimum downlink rate among the users that a UAV serves. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, we will divide it into four sub-problems. Afterwards, an iterative algorithm is proposed to optimize the four sub-problems by using the block coordinate descent method, successive convex approximation and sequential quadratic programming. Simulation results show that the addition of directional antennas results in a better performance in terms of throughput compared with omni-directional benchmarks.