Efficient Wireless Static Chargers Deployment for UAV Networks

To prolong the lifetime of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, this paper studies how to efficiently deploy wireless static chargers (WSCs) in UAV networks (WDU). That is, given a set of UAVs, determining the minimum number of WSCs as well as the location of each WSC, so that UAVs do not run out of energy during flight. We first formulate WDU as an optimization problem, which is proved to be NP-hard. Then to solve WDU, we propose the scheme of selecting WSCs’ locations by transforming WDU into a binary integer programming (BIP) problem (SLTB). In SLTB, we first propose a novel area discretization method to reduce the solution space of WDU, and then WDU is reformulated as a BIP problem that can be easily solved by existing methods. Finally, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of SLTB in terms of reducing the number of WSCs.