Modularity-Based Dynamic Clustering for Energy Efficient UAVs-Aided Communications

In this letter, we propose a novel modularity-based dynamic clustering relying on modified Louvain method for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-aided mobile communications. Our aim is to save the transmit power of the mobile devices, by locating the UAVs vertically projected on the centroids of the user clusters. We further propose two types of operation for the modularity-based dynamic clustering, namely the recurring operation and the differential operation. We show that the proposed method requires substantially lower transmit power of the mobile devices and lower energy consumption of the UAVs than that required by the K-means-based solution. We also show that the differential operation is more suitable for networks with lower proportion of moving users, since it consumes significantly less energy than that required by the recurring operation at the cost of requiring slightly higher transmit power of mobile devices.