Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications: Performance and Tradeoffs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the deployment of UAVs as flying base stations coexisting with D2D networks, deriving analytical models for coverage, rate, and power tradeoffs, and proposing optimal deployment strategies for different scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analytical framework for UAV-based coverage with D2D coexistence, including mobility strategies and tradeoff analysis, which advances understanding of UAV deployment optimization.

Findings

Optimal UAV altitude maximizes coverage and sum-rate depending on D2D density.

Intelligent UAV movement reduces total transmit power needed for coverage.

Tradeoff between coverage and delay is characterized by the number of stop points.

Abstract

In this paper, the deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a flying base station used to provide on the fly wireless communications to a given geographical area is analyzed. In particular, the co-existence between the UAV, that is transmitting data in the downlink, and an underlaid device-todevice (D2D) communication network is considered. For this model, a tractable analytical framework for the coverage and rate analysis is derived. Two scenarios are considered: a static UAV and a mobile UAV. In the first scenario, the average coverage probability and the system sum-rate for the users in the area are derived as a function of the UAV altitude and the number of D2D users. In the second scenario, using the disk covering problem, the minimum number of stop points that the UAV needs to visit in order to completely cover the area is computed. Furthermore, considering multiple retransmissions for the UAV and D2D users, the overall outage probability of the D2D users is derived. Simulation and analytical results show that, depending on the density of D2D users, optimal values for the UAV altitude exist for which the system sum-rate and the coverage probability are maximized. Moreover, our results also show that, by enabling the UAV to intelligently move over the target area, the total required transmit power of UAV while covering the entire area, is minimized. Finally, in order to provide a full coverage for the area of interest, the tradeoff between the coverage and delay, in terms of the number of stop points, is discussed.