Coverage Hole Avoidance Through Optimized UAV Path-planning
Bahareh Jafari, Mazen O. Hasna, Hossein Pishro-Nik, Nizar Zorba, Tamer M. Khattab, Hamid Saeedi · 2024
Coverage holes directly affect the quality of service (QoS) and reliability of wireless networks and should be avoided as much as possible. In this paper we address this issue through the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile base stations and we propose proper UAV path planning. While most of the works in the literature define holes based on statistical sense, i.e., when the coverage probability for a point on cell is below a certain threshold, e.g., 95%, in this paper, we target applications that allow only for short time disconnections, and define a location that is not covered for a certain amount of time to be in a coverage hole. To minimize such holes, we use optimal UAV path planning based on the two families of trajectories, namely, spiral and oval curves. We show that the proposed oval curves will result in a better performance in addressing the coverage holes and can guarantee a minimum signal to noise ratio over the whole coverage area, and over a guaranteed amount of time.