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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the deployment and performance of drone small cells (DSCs), deriving optimal altitudes and separation distances to maximize coverage and minimize power use, supported by numerical validation.

Contribution

It introduces analytical methods for optimizing DSC altitude and placement to enhance coverage, addressing deployment challenges in aerial wireless networks.

Findings

Optimal DSC altitude for maximum coverage and minimum power is derived.

Maximum coverage with two DSCs depends on their separation distance.

Numerical results confirm the existence of optimal deployment parameters.

Abstract

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.