# A Distributed Approach for Networked Flying Platform Association with Small Cells in 5G+ Networks

## TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed, greedy algorithm for associating small-cell base stations with networked flying platform hubs in 5G+ networks, improving backhaul efficiency using UAVs and balloons.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed association method leveraging networked flying platforms for small-cell backhaul in 5G+ networks, addressing infrastructure limitations.

## Key findings

- The proposed method achieves near-optimal sum rate performance.
- It significantly reduces run-time compared to exhaustive search.
- The approach effectively manages backhaul link limitations.

## Abstract

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.