In this paper, a collaboration scheme between a high-altitude platform (HAP) and several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for wireless communication networks is investigated. The main objective of this study is to maximize the total downlink throughput of the ground users by optimizing the UAVs' three-dimensional (3D) placements and user associations. An optimization problem is formulated and a separate genetic-algorithm-based approach is proposed to solve the problem. The K-means algorithm is also utilized to find the initial UAV placement to reduce the convergence time of the proposed genetic-algorithm-based allocation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in terms of convergence time, complexity, and fairness. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed HAP-UAV integrated network achieves a higher total throughput through joint user association and UAV placement schemes compared to a scheme with a single HAP serving all users.
Keywords: 3D placement; HAP-UAV collaboration; high-altitude platform (HAP); unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); user association.