Drone-Assisted Communications for Remote Areas and Disaster Relief
This work addresses communication challenges in remote and disaster-stricken areas, but appears incremental as it builds on existing UAV-assisted network concepts with energy-aware routing.
The paper tackles the problem of designing a drone-assisted wireless communication system for remote areas and disaster relief by minimizing the number of UAVs needed to support ground user demand, while incorporating an energy-aware routing scheme to extend UAV flight time.
We explore an end-to-end (including access and backhaul links) UAV-assisted wireless communication system, considering both uplink and downlink traffics, with the goal of supporting demand of the Ground Users (GUs) using the minimum number of UAVs. Moreover, in order to extend the operational (flight) time of UAVs, we exploit an energy-aware routing scheme. Our intention is to design and analyze the access and backhaul connectivity of a drone-assisted communication network for remote and crowded areas and disaster relief, while minimizing the resources required i.e., the number of UAVs.