UAVs as Mobile Infrastructure: Addressing Battery Lifetime

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of UAVs as flying cellular infrastructure, focusing on battery life limitations and evaluating three charging strategies through simulations to enhance network performance.

Contribution

It introduces three battery charging options for UAV-based cellular infrastructure and assesses their impact via simulations, addressing a key challenge in UAV deployment.

Findings

Charging options significantly affect UAV operational time.

Simulation results show improved network coverage with optimized charging.

Battery management strategies can extend UAV service duration.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play an important role in next generation cellular networks, acting as flying infrastructure which can serve ground users when regular infrastructure is overloaded or unavailable. As these devices are expected to operate wirelessly they will rely on an internal battery for their power supply, which will limit the amount of time they can operate over an area of interest before having to recharge. In this article, we outline three battery charging options that may be considered by a network operator and use simulations to demonstrate the performance impact of incorporating those options into a cellular network where UAV infrastructure provides wireless service.