Swarm of Robotic Aerial Base Stations for mmWave Multi-Hop Backhauling

Robotic aerial base stations (RABSs) that are able to anchor at tall urban landforms are expected to bring further flexibility to millimeter-wave (mmWave) multi-hop backhaul networks in highly dense urban environments. In this paper, a swarm of RABSs are deployed to construct a dynamic mmWave backhaul network according to the traffic spatial distribution, and relocate their positions in subsequent time epochs according to the traffic temporal dynamic. The overall energy efficiency of the proposed framework is maximized by determining the RABS deployment, relocation and route formation under the channel capacity and hop constraints. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear fractional programming (MILFP) and a two-stage method is developed to overcome the computational complexity. A wide set of numerical investigations reveal that compared to fixed small cells, only half as many RABSs are required to cover the same volume of traffic demand.