Drone Small Cells in the Clouds: Design, Deployment and Performance Analysis

By Mohammad Mozaffari, Walid Saad, Medhi Bennis, Merouane Debbah. Global Communications Conference, 2014

648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The use of drone small cells (DSCs) which are aerial wireless base stations that can be mounted on flying devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is emerging as an effective technique for providing wireless services to ground users in a variety of scenarios. The efficient deployment of such DSCs while optimizing the covered area is one of the key design challenges. In this paper, considering the low altitude platform (LAP), the downlink coverage performance of DSCs is investigated. The optimal DSC altitude which leads to a maximum ground coverage and minimum required transmit power for a single DSC is derived. Furthermore, the problem of providing a maximum coverage for a certain geographical area using two DSCs is investigated in two scenarios; interference free and full interference between DSCs. The impact of the distance between DSCs on the coverage area is studied and the optimal distance between DSCs resulting in maximum coverage is derived. Numerical results verify our analytical results on the existence of optimal DSCs altitude/separation distance and provide insights on the optimal deployment of DSCs to supplement wireless network coverage.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0483fbe1af4a2e0fa581e2f922eff3a326a5bf48

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Citations in the corpus

Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles: opportunities and challenges (2016, background): “Such a tradeoff has been characterized in [12], [13], based on which the optimal UAV altitude has been obtained.”
Energy-Efficient UAV Control for Effective and Fair Communication Coverage: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach (2018, background): “UNMANNED Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be used to serve as aerial Base Stations (BSs) to enhance both the coverage and performance of communication networks in various scenarios [1], such as emergency communications”
Efficient 3-D placement of an aerial base station in next generation cellular networks (2016, background): “Accordingly, the authors of [7] investigate the coverage of two drone-cells positioned at a fixed altitude, and interfering with each other over a given area.”
On the Number and 3D Placement of Drone Base Stations in Wireless Cellular Networks (2016, background): “In [4] the optimum altitude of a single drone-BS to obtain a required coverage while minimizing the transmit power is found.”
Caching in the Sky: Proactive Deployment of Cache-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Optimized Quality-of-Experience (2016, methodology): “However, this existing literature [10]–[17] was focused on performance analysis and did not consider prediction of usercentric behavioral patterns such as mobility nor it study the use of UAVs for caching purposes.”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, neutral): “The authors of [218] describe the tradeoff in this model.”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications: Performance and Tradeoffs (2015, background): “The work in [10] extends the results of [9] to the case of two UAVs while considering interference between the UAVs.”
Distributed Drone Base Station Positioning for Emergency Cellular Networks Using Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “…between a free-space path loss and an additional loss, which depends on whether there is line of sight (LOS) between the drone and the user or not [10] where d d is the distance between drones and users, c is the speed of light, and ξ is the additional loss which assumes different values for LOS…”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, methodology): “In [115], by assuming that two UAV BSs are employed to serve a target rectangular area on the ground, the 3D locations of both UAVs were determined to maximize the fraction of the area covered by the UAV BSs.”
Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2020, background): “In [41], the authors ﬁrst derived the optimal altitude of a single UAVBS needed to attain maximum downlink coverage and minimum transmit power consumption, and then the optimal placement (altitude and separating distance between UAVBSs) of two UAVBSs is determined to maximize the coverage…”
Efficient Deployment of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Optimal Wireless Coverage (2016, background): “However, only a limited number of existing literature have addressed the interplay between UAV deployment and wireless performance [1], [4]–[6].”
Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities (2019, background): “Furthermore, Mozaffari et al. [151] evaluated and argued the optimal altitude values for small drone cell clouds which lead to the minimum transmit power and maximum coverage area.”
A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, positive): “In [12], we extended the results of [11] to the case of two, interfering UAVs.”
UAV-Assisted Heterogeneous Networks for Capacity Enhancement (2016, background): “point over the demand area, deploying more UAVs operating in coordination is more challenging due to interference from other aerial nodes [5].”
Survey on UAV Cellular Communications: Practical Aspects, Standardization Advancements, Regulation, and Security Challenges (2018, background): “For example, minimizing the transmission power of one UAV [98] or multiple UAVs [99] when they are deployed in the optimal location to cover the target area is studied in the literature.”
3-D Placement of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Station (UAV-BS) for Energy-Efficient Maximal Coverage (2017, methodology): “[9] optimized the UAV-BS altitude that results in maximum coverage region and minimum transmit power for two cases, a single UAV-BS and two UAV-BSs.”
Multi-Tier Drone Architecture for 5G/B5G Cellular Networks: Challenges, Trends, and Prospects (2017, background): “[1] investigates the impact of altitude on the downlink coverage of a static UAV.”