Efficient 3-D Placement of an Aerial Base Station in Next Generation Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of optimally placing drone-based aerial base stations in 3D space to maximize network revenue, proposing an efficient optimization solution and validating it through simulations.

Contribution

It formulates the 3D drone-cell placement as a mixed integer non-linear optimization problem and provides a computationally efficient solution method.

Findings

Proposed a 3D placement model for drone-cells considering air-to-ground channel differences.

Developed a quadratic constrained mixed integer non-linear programming solution.

Validated the approach with numerical simulations demonstrating effectiveness.

Abstract

Agility and resilience requirements of future cellular networks may not be fully satisfied by terrestrial base stations in cases of unexpected or temporary events. A promising solution is assisting the cellular network via low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with base stations, i.e., drone-cells. Although drone-cells provide a quick deployment opportunity as aerial base stations, efficient placement becomes one of the key issues. In addition to mobility of the drone-cells in the vertical dimension as well as the horizontal dimension, the differences between the air-to-ground and terrestrial channels cause the placement of the drone-cells to diverge from placement of terrestrial base stations. In this paper, we first highlight the properties of the dronecell placement problem, and formulate it as a 3-D placement problem with the objective of maximizing the revenue of the network. After some mathematical manipulations, we formulate an equivalent quadratically-constrained mixed integer non-linear optimization problem and propose a computationally efficient numerical solution for this problem. We verify our analytical derivations with numerical simulations and enrich them with discussions which could serve as guidelines for researchers, mobile network operators, and policy makers.