Joint Channel Bandwidth Assignment and Relay Positioning for Predictive Flying Networks

Abstract

Flying Networks (FNs) have emerged as a promising solution to provide on-demand wireless connectivity when network coverage is insufficient or the communications infrastructure is compromised, such as in disaster management scenarios. Despite extensive research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) positioning and radio resource allocation, the challenge of ensuring reliable traffic relay through backhaul links in predictive FNs remains unexplored. This work proposes Simulated Annealing for predictive FNs (SAFnet), an innovative algorithm that optimizes network performance under positioning constraints, limited bandwidth and minimum rate requirements. Our algorithm uniquely leverages prior knowledge of the first-tier node trajectories to assign bandwidth and dynamically adjust the position of the second-tier flying relay. Building upon Simulated Annealing, our approach enhances this well-known AI algorithm with penalty functions, achieving performance levels comparable to exhaustive search while significantly reducing computational complexity.