Underlay Drone Cell for Temporary Events: Impact of Drone Height and Aerial Channel Environments

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework using stochastic geometry to evaluate how drone height and urban environments affect coverage in temporary event scenarios with aerial base stations, guiding optimal deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile analytical model for coverage probability considering various aerial channel environments and validates it with simulations, aiding drone deployment strategies.

Findings

Coverage varies significantly with urban environment type.

Optimal drone height depends on environment and coverage goals.

Analytical results closely match Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

Providing seamless connection to a large number of devices is one of the biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Using a drone as an aerial base station (ABS) to provide coverage to devices or users on ground is envisaged as a promising solution for IoT networks. In this paper, we consider a communication network with an underlay ABS to provide coverage for a temporary event, such as a sporting event or a concert in a stadium. Using stochastic geometry, we propose a general analytical framework to compute the uplink and downlink coverage probabilities for both the aerial and the terrestrial cellular system. Our framework is valid for any aerial channel model for which the probabilistic functions of line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links are specified. The accuracy of the analytical results is verified by Monte Carlo simulations considering two commonly adopted aerial channel models. Our results show the non-trivial impact of the different aerial channel environments (i.e., suburban, urban, dense urban and high-rise urban) on the uplink and downlink coverage probabilities and provide design guidelines for best ABS deployment height.