An Efficient 3-D Positioning Approach to Minimize Required UAVs for IoT Network Coverage

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to cover users in wireless networks has increased in recent years. Deploying UAVs in appropriate positions is important to cover users and nodes properly. In this article, we propose an efficient approach to determine the minimum number of required UAVs and their optimal positions. To this end, we use an iterative algorithm that updates the number of required UAVs at each iteration. To determine the optimal position for the UAVs, we present a mathematical model and solve it accurately after linearizing. One of the inputs of the mathematical model is a set of candidate points for UAV deployments in 2-D space. The mathematical model selects a set of points among candidate points and determines the altitude of each UAV. To provide a suitable set of candidate points, we also propose a candidate point selection method: the MergeCells method. The simulation results show that the proposed approach performs better than the 3-D P-median approach introduced in the literature. We also compare different candidate point selection approaches, and we show that the MergeCells method outperforms other methods in terms of the number of UAVs, user data rates, and simulation time.