UAV-FAP: User Fairness-Driven Access Point on UAV for Wi-Fi Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been an emerging technology used for various applications. Enabling wireless base station (e.g., Wi-Fi AP) on UAV can be one of promising UAV applications. In this work, we focus on a performance fairness issue on ground Wi-Fi users and aim to maximize the minimum throughput performance among them. To this end, we propose a solution, designated UAV-FAP (UAV with user Fairness-driven AP), to drive UAV-AP to reach a location that can offer max-min throughput performance. It employs a heuristic-based hierarchical search method to search for the target location efficiently. By conducting experiments on a real UAV-AP platform, we first study the issues of antenna pointing direction and vertical/horizontal UAV-AP placement, and then collect Wi-Fi throughput statistics for a trace-driven simulator in the evaluation. The evaluation result shows that UAV-FAP can outperform the default case, where the UAV-AP stays at the center of a serving area, by 2.0%-21.5% throughput gains; in some cases, it takes as small as only 7% of the moving distance needed by a fine-grained exhaustive search to reach target max-min locations.