Abstract:In drone assisted mobile networks, drones mounted small cell base stations (DBSs) are responsively and flexibly deployed over any Places of Interest (PoI), such as sporadic hotspots and disaster-struck areas, where the existing mobile network infrastructure is unable to provide wireless coverage. Here, a DBS is a relay node to relay traffic between a nearby macro base station (MBS) and the users. In addition, Free-space optics (FSO) is applied as the backhauling solution to significantly increase the capacity of the backhaul link between an MBS and a DBS in a drone assisted mobile network. Most of the existing DBS placement solutions assume the FSO based backhaul link provides sufficient link capacity, which may not be true, especially when a DBS is placed far away from an MBS (e.g., > 10 km in disaster-struck areas) or in a bad weather condition. In this paper, we formulate a problem to jointly optimize bandwidth allocation and DBS placement by considering the FSO based backhaul link capacity constraint. A Backhaul awaRe bandwidth allOcAtion and DBS placement (BROAD) algorithm is designed to efficiently solve the problem, and the performance of the algorithm is demonstrated via extensive simulations.