Control of an UAV Acting as a Communication Base Station to Satisfy Data Requirements

This paper proposes a method for the trajectory planning of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acting as an aerial base station of a communication network. The UAV base station provides wireless communication for moving ground vehicles with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. The ground vehicles follow locally planned trajectories, which are communicated to the aerial base station. The UAV possesses a network estimator which determines the channel properties between the UAV and each ground vehicle. Whenever the QoS deceeds a threshold the UAV trajectory is changed based on this estimate by a trajectory planning unit in a way to fulfil all individual QoS requirements of the ground vehicles if possible. In contrast to literature, this approach considers the communication relay between moving vehicles with different QoS requirements. The performance of the method is demonstrated in a simulation study.