Proportionally fair load balancing with statistical quality of service provisioning for aerial base stations

<jats:p>Aerial base stations (ABSs) seem promising to enhance the coverage and capacity of fifth‐generation and upcoming networks. With the flexible mobility of ABSs, they can be positioned in air to maximize the number of users served with a guaranteed quality of service (QoS). However, ABSs may be overloaded or underutilized given inefficient placement, and user association has not been well addressed. Hence, we propose a three‐dimensional ABS placement scheme with a delay‐QoS‐driven user association to balance loading among ABSs. First, a load balancing utility function is designed based on proportional fairness. Then, an optimization problem for joint ABS placement and user association is formulated to maximize the utility function subject to statistical delay QoS requirements and ABS collision avoidance constraints. To solve this problem, we introduce an efficient modified gray wolf optimizer for ABS placement with a greedy user association strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms baselines in terms of load balancing and delay QoS provisioning.</jats:p>