AIM: Angle-of-Radiation-based Deployment of UAV Relays for Connectivity in 3D Environments
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Start Page
1
End Page
14
ISSN
1536-1233
1558-0660
2161-9875
Date Issued
2025-11-10
Author(s)
Abstract
—With mobility and flexibility in non-terrestrial environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown the potential for emerging applications, such as remote surveillance and mobile base stations. This work raises the emerging need to chain UAV relays in support of on-demand connectivity to faraway users. However, the ideal isotropic antennas are too simplified to ensure connectivity among UAVs. Since antennas used in realistic communication systems including UAVs are non-isotropic, and the angle of radiations (AoR) between a pair of transmitter and receiver significantly influences received signal strengths (RSSs). Therefore, this work takes the AoR into account to deploy UAV relays in a 3D environment. Not only positions but also the headings of UAVs are modeled in the AoR-based deployment problem to minimize the number of UAVs in the relay chain, while the end-to-end RSSs are guaranteed. We prove the NP-hardness of the AoR-based deployment problem. Then, the Angle-of- Radiation-based Deployment (AIM) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. The extensive simulation results show that the AIM algorithm reduces the number of UAVs used in the relay chain by 59.6% compared to the baselines when the heading of each UAV is well-adjusted. Also, the proposed AIM algorithm outperforms the baselines by 61.2% in terms of the average number of UAVs and demonstrates adaptability to various terrains.
Subjects
angle of radiation
relay chain
UAV-to-UAV communications
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Type
journal article