Practical Optimization Methods for UAV Relay Positions in an Adaptive Rate MANET

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may become key to communication infrastructures, both in civilian crisis scenarios and in military use-cases. An earlier study has shown that the available capacity can be affected by the UAV's position and that the position for optimal network capacity may not be in the center between two ground nodes. In this paper, we investigate factors that impact the positioning of UAVs used to support ground-based communications. There are multiple trade-offs between the UAV's available information, the number of available UAVs and the resulting achieved throughput. We propose and evaluate strategies through ns-3 simulations. The results show that different positioning strategies are preferable in static versus mobile networks.