Beyond 5G With UAVs: Foundations of a 3D Wireless Cellular Network

By Mohammad Mozaffari, Ali Taleb Zadeh Kasgari, Walid Saad, Medhi Bennis, Merouane Debbah. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2018

371 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, a novel concept of three-dimensional (3D) cellular networks, that integrate drone base stations (drone-BS) and cellular-connected drone users (drone-UEs), is introduced. For this new 3D cellular architecture, a novel framework for network planning for drone-BSs and latency-minimal cell association for drone-UEs is proposed. For network planning, a tractable method for drone-BSs’ deployment based on the notion of truncated octahedron shapes is proposed, which ensures full coverage for a given space with a minimum number of drone-BSs. In addition, to characterize frequency planning in such 3D wireless networks, an analytical expression for the feasible integer frequency reuse factors is derived. Subsequently, an optimal 3D cell association scheme is developed for which the drone-UEs’ latency, considering transmission, computation, and backhaul delays, is minimized. To this end, first, the spatial distribution of the drone-UEs is estimated using a kernel density estimation method, and the parameters of the estimator are obtained using a cross-validation method. Then, according to the spatial distribution of drone-UEs and the locations of drone-BSs, the latency-minimal 3D cell association for drone-UEs is derived by exploiting tools from an optimal transport theory. The simulation results show that the proposed approach reduces the latency of drone-UEs compared with the classical cell association approach that uses a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) criterion. In particular, the proposed approach yields a reduction of up to 46% in the average latency compared with the SINR-based association. The results also show that the proposed latency-optimal cell association improves the spectral efficiency of a 3D wireless cellular network of drones.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4499f86c2a99bbe29ab00cb2f783d5baaaa86ec9

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Citations in the corpus

Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing: Resource Allocation and Trajectory Optimization (2020, methodology): “In this work, the maximum likelihood cross-validation method [38], [39] is adopted to determine the bandwidth h x and h y .”
A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “In fact, to support a large-scale deployment of drones, a reliable wireless communication infrastructure is needed to effectively control the drones’ operations while supporting the traffic stemming from their application services [93].”
Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks (2019, methodology): “Deploying UAVs as users, [25] proposed a novel concept of 3D cellular networks and developed an optimal 3D cell association scheme [26].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, methodology): “Authors in [276] have proposed a framework for UAVbased 3D cellular network for beyond 5G that provide a solutions for placement of UAV-ABS in three dimension (using truncated octahedron approach) as well as latency-sensitive association of UAV-based user equipment to UAV-ABS.”
Communications and Control for Wireless Drone-Based Antenna Array (2017, background): “In wireless networks, drones can be used as flying base stations to provide reliable and cost-effective wireless connectivity [2]–[12].”
Non-Terrestrial Networks in 5G & Beyond: A Survey (2020, background): “Indeed, the integration of spaceborne and airborne platforms with terrestrial networks may achieve even more success in 6G [141], [142].”
A Vision of 6G Wireless Systems: Applications, Trends, Technologies, and Open Research Problems (2019, background): “Our work in [10] showed that such 3D planning is substantially different from conventional 2D networks due to the new altitude dimension and the associated degrees of freedom.”
UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, background): “[”
Cellular-Enabled UAV Communication: A Connectivity-Constrained Trajectory Optimization Perspective (2018, background): “In [33], a 3D cellular network with both UAV-mounted BSs and UAVs as aerial users was investigated, where the 3D cell association of aerial users was optimized to minimize the average latency.”
6G Wireless Communication Systems: Applications, Requirements, Technologies, Challenges, and Research Directions (2019, background): “The 3D BSs will be provided through low orbit satellites and UAVs [47], [48].”
UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends (2019, background): “On the other hand, UAVs can also be used as aerial nodes to enable a multitude of applications ranging from cargo delivery to surveillance, which is commonly referred to as cellularconnected UAVs [10], [11].”
Non-Terrestrial Networks in the 6G Era: Challenges and Opportunities (2019, background): “To address these issues, 6G research is currently focusing on the development of non-ter-restrial non-ter-restrial networks (NTNs) to promote ubiquitous and high-capacity global connectivity [4].”