Route Planning of Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Maritime Communication Coverage.

The problem of route planning is important for setting up communication base station based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This paper proposes a route planning algorithm by creating control points and route patterns in the resource-limited scenario of maritime communication. The algorithm could realize the route planning under coupling constraints of the UAV communication base stations’ total number, transmission distance, flight speed and turning radius. The simulation result shows a significant improvement than existing methods. The minimum on-line rate of the users obtained by the algorithm proposed in this paper is up to 33% higher than the former algorithm, and up to 54% higher than distribute the UAVs evenly. The increase of the average on-line rate also gets a slightly improvement up to 16% and 27% respectively.