Optimal energy allocation policies for a high altitude flying wireless access point

Connecting people in rural and remote areas, providing ubiquitous Internet access by filling the coverage gaps, and bringing people back online after disasters recently dominated the telecommunications industry. Inspired by this stream, an online resource allocation problem for a network of mobile access points (AP) travelling on the edge of space is studied. The AP allocates its resources (available energy) to maximize the total service provided to the users such as total utility (reward). The problem is formulated as a 0/1 dynamic knapsack problem with incremental capacity over a finite time horizon, the solution of which is quite open in the literature. For this problem, two main approaches, namely stochastic and deterministic formulations are followed. In deterministic model, several online heuristics are proposed based on an instantaneous threshold that can adapt to short-time-scale dynamics. For the stochastic model, the optimality of a threshold based solution is shown using a dynamic programming setup, and a threshold based policy via the expected threshold method is obtained. The performance analysis of all heuristics is comparatively conducted. 1