Altitude and density optimization over UAV‐enabled massive IoT wireless communications

Abstract

Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations is a new and promising technology that enables the connectivity of a large volume of devices such as sensors and machines, referred to as massive Internet of Things (mIoT). This article aims to analyze and optimize the area spectral efficiency (ASE) by investigating the efficient deployment of UAVs to ensure reliable uplink communication from ground IoT devices to UAVs. We utilize the tools from stochastic geometry to derive the closed form expression of the ASE in the interference-limited regime. We propose a novel framework for maximizing the ASE of UAV-enabled networks by simultaneous optimization of UAVs' altitude and density. The simulation results demonstrate that deploying UAVs with combined optimal density and altitude outperforms more conventional deployment strategies in terms of the ASE.