UAV Positioning for Throughput Maximization Using Deep Learning Approaches

Sensors (Basel). 2019 Jun 20;19(12):2775. doi: 10.3390/s19122775.

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a communication platform has great practical importance for future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment for temporary and emergency conditions. The user throughput estimation in a wireless system depends on the data traffic load and the available capacity to support that load. In UAV-assisted communication, the position of the UAV is one major factor that affects the capacity available to the data flows being served. This study applies multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and long short term memory (LSTM) approaches to determine the position of a UAV that maximizes the overall system performance and user throughput. To analyze and evaluate the system performance, we apply the hybrid of MLP-LSTM for classification regression tasks and K-means algorithms for automatic clustering of classes. The implementation of our work is done through TensorFlow packages. The performance of our proposed system is compared with other approaches to give accurate and novel results for both classification and regression tasks of the user throughput maximization and UAV positioning. According to the results, 98% of the user throughput maximization accuracy is correctly classified. Moreover, the UAV positioning provides accuracy levels of 94.73%, 98.33%, and 99.53% for original datasets (scenario 1), reduced features on the estimated values of user throughput at each grid point (scenario 2), and reduced feature datasets collected on different days and grid points achieved maximum throughput (scenario 3), respectively.

Keywords: UAV; deep learning (DL); maximization; positioning; user throughput.