Deployment and Trajectory Optimization of UAVs for Emergency Communication in Post-Disaster Areas

Advancements in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology have enabled UAV-assisted base stations (UAV-BSs) to support emergency communication in post-disaster areas. Due to the limited duration of the UAV and the restricted communication coverage of the base station, it is hard to cover all the ground terminals (GTs) in a large-scale area with a certain number of UAV-BSs. This paper addresses the joint optimization problem of deployment and trajectory of UAV-BSs for emergency communication in the post-disaster area. We formulate the UAV-BS deployment as a disk cover problem and develop a minimum enclosing circle algorithm to determine the optimal coverage radius, thereby minimizing the required transmit power. To minimize the total energy consumption, we utilize a large neighborhood search (LNS) algorithm to find the best deployment and coverage radii of UAV-BSs, as well as the optimal UAVs' trajectories. Experimental results from real-world cases demonstrate that our proposed method and algorithm effectively adapt to instances with diverse distributions of GTs.