On the Number and 3D Placement of Drone Base Stations in Wireless Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a heuristic method to optimally position a minimal number of drone base stations in 3D to enhance coverage and capacity in wireless networks with varying user densities, ensuring quality-of-service.

Contribution

It introduces a novel heuristic algorithm for determining the optimal number and 3D placement of drone-BSs in cellular networks with diverse user distributions.

Findings

The approach effectively satisfies network QoS requirements.

It reduces the number of drone-BSs needed for coverage.

Simulation results validate the method's efficiency.

Abstract

Using drone base stations (drone-BSs) in wireless networks has started attracting attention. Drone-BSs can assist the ground BSs in both capacity and coverage enhancement. One of the important problems about integrating drone-BSs to cellular networks is the management of their placement to satisfy the dynamic system requirements. In this paper, we propose a method to find the positions of drone-BSs in an area with different user densities using a heuristic algorithm. The goal is to find the minimum number of drone-BSs and their 3D placement so that all the users are served. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach can satisfy the quality-of-service requirements of the network.