A Social Spider Optimisation Algorithm for 3D Unmanned Aerial Base Stations Placement

International audience; In recent years, the use of drones as aerial base stations (ABS) has attracted the attention of both scientific and industrial communities as a promising solution to enhance the network coverage. However, their deployment brings out many challenges and restrictions. In this work, we model a realistic, constrained scenario where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used as ABSs along with traditional ground base stations (GBSs) to extend their coverage. We propose a scalable and efficient social spider optimization (SSO) algorithm that determines the placement of UAVs and their association with both user equipments (UEs) and GBSs. Extensive computational experiments we…