Where to Deploy an Airborne Relay in Unknown Environments: Feasible Locations for Throughput and LoS Enhancement

Abstract: The deployment of heterogeneous teams of both air and ground mobile assets combines the advantages of mobility, sensing capability, and operational duration when performing complex tasks. Air assets in such teams act to relay information between ground assets but must maintain unblocked paths to enable high-capacity communication modes. Obstacles in the operational environment may block the line of sight (LoS) between air assets and ground assets depending on their locations and heights. In this paper, we analyze the probability of spanning a two-hop communication between a pair of ground assets deployed in an environment with obstacles at random locations and with random heights (i.e. a Poisson Forest) using an air asset at any location near the ground assets. We provide a closed-form expression of the LoS probability based on the 3-dimensional locations of the air asset. We then compute a 3-D manifold of the air asset locations that satisfy a given LoS probability constraint. We further consider throughput as a measure of communication quality, and use it as an optimization objective.