Title: Voronoi Tesselation-based load-balanced multi-objective priority-based heuristic optimisation for multi-cell region coverage with UAVs

Authors: Kemal Ihsan Kilic; Orhan Gemikonakli; Leonardo Mostarda

Addresses: Computer Science Division, University of Camerino, Camerino MC, Italy ' Faculty of Engineering, Final International University, Toroslar Caddesi, No. 6, Çatalköy, Girne, Mersin 10, Turkey ' Computer Science Division, University of Camerino, Camerino MC, Italy

Abstract: The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile base stations (BSs) for urgent temporal communication and infrastructure offloading has been proposed as an efficient and economic solution in many studies. Our work is focused on the optimisation of the region coverage with UAVs in such cases. The proposed multi-objective priority-based optimisation framework utilises an evolutionary heuristic algorithm with a custom-designed scoring scheme to achieve this task. Voronoi Tesselation of the region, based on the existing nearby BSs, is proposed for better signal reception and for load balancing the data rate. The proposed framework, besides maximising the coverage, considers minimising overlapping regions between UAVs, minimising overflowing regions (coverage outside of the region) for the UAVs, and flight distance of the UAVs from/to the BS. Depending on the requirements of the coverage scenario, one or more objectives can be prioritised or can be ignored over the others.

Keywords: region coverage; multi-objective optimisation; unmanned aerial vehicles; UAVs; heuristic evolutionary algorithms; Voronoi Tesselation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2021.114574

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2021 Vol.17 No.2, pp.152 - 178

Received: 12 Sep 2020
Accepted: 25 Sep 2020
Published online: 27 Apr 2021 *

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