Backhaul-aware Robust 3D Drone Placement in 5G+ Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores optimal 3D placement of drone base stations in 5G+ networks considering backhaul link limitations, aiming to maximize served users or sum-rates while ensuring robustness against user movements.

Contribution

It introduces network-centric and user-centric approaches for backhaul-aware drone-BS placement, optimizing for different performance metrics under backhaul constraints.

Findings

Optimal 3D placement strategies depend on backhaul data rates.

Robustness analysis shows sensitivity to user displacements affects network performance.

Proposed methods improve coverage and efficiency in drone-assisted networks.

Abstract

Using drones as flying base stations is a promising approach to enhance the network coverage and area capacity by moving supply towards demand when required. However deployment of such base stations can face some restrictions that need to be considered. One of the limitations in drone base stations (drone-BSs) deployment is the availability of reliable wireless backhaul link. This paper investigates how different types of wireless backhaul offering various data rates would affect the number of served users. Two approaches, namely, network-centric and user-centric, are introduced and the optimal 3D backhaul-aware placement of a drone-BS is found for each approach. To this end, the total number of served users and sum-rates are maximized in the network-centric and user-centric frameworks, respectively. Moreover, as it is preferred to decrease drone-BS movements to save more on battery and increase flight time and to reduce the channel variations, the robustness of the network is examined as how sensitive it is with respect to the users displacements.