Skyward bound: Empowering disaster resilience with multi-UAV-assisted B5G networks for enhanced connectivity and energy efficiency

It is not uncommon that cellular communication infrastructures will likely be in a failure state when disaster strikes, e.g., floods, earthquakes, and forest fires. Therefore, developing an effective disaster management system is paramount to facing these critical circumstances. As a solution, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed as temporary aerial base stations to assist beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks during and after the disaster. UAVs are increasingly used to aid the search and rescue (SAR) teams in multiple disaster management operations to improve disaster response effectiveness. However, maintaining connectivity and improving energy efficiency are indispensable to ensure continuous communication between the UAVs and SAR and prolong the network's lifetime. This paper proposes a multi-UAV and SAR device-to-device communication model to maintain connectivity and enhance energy efficiency in multiple disaster scenarios. A clustering approach for UAV placement is utilized to improve energy efficiency, network connectivity, and coverage. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model in terms of the average capacity, energy efficiency, coverage probability and outage probability. The simulation results demonstrate an improved performance of multi-UAV and SAR collaborations and their appropriateness to support efficient and reliable disaster recovery in hard-to-reach and remote disaster areas.