Service on Demand: Drone Base Stations Cruising in the Cellular Network

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel free movement model for drone base stations in cellular networks, analyzing its impact on network performance, user association, and collision avoidance through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new mobility model for drone base stations that allows free movement, along with a smart user association scheme to improve network performance.

Findings

Smart user association significantly improves network performance.

Free movement model enhances load balancing and signal quality.

Proposed algorithm effectively prevents drone collisions.

Abstract

In this paper, the deployment of drone base stations to provide higher performance in the cellular networks is analyzed. In particular, we investigate a new mobility model for drone base stations where they can move freely in the network, ignoring the cell boundaries. Free movement model for drones bring out new challenges such as user association and physical collision among drones. We consider two user association schemes and evaluate their performance through simulation. We show that by deploying a smart user association scheme in the free movement model, the obtained results are greatly better than those restricting each drone base station to fly over a certain small cell area, and serving local users. Additionally, the impact of drones' movement on the load balance, signal strength and interference are studied. Moreover, we show that our proposed algorithm can maintain a comfortable distance among the drones to avoid physical collision.