Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for UAV-Aided Heterogeneous Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Model

TL;DR

This paper models UAV-aided heterogeneous networks using stochastic geometry, demonstrating that NOMA improves performance over OMA, with insights into association, coverage, and spectrum efficiency influenced by various parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic geometry model for UAV-assisted HetNets with NOMA, providing analytical expressions and performance insights under realistic channel conditions.

Findings

NOMA-enabled HetNets outperform OMA in spectrum efficiency.

Tradeoff exists between association probabilities and spectrum efficiency.

Coverage and spectrum efficiency are affected by ipSIC, power allocation, and SINR thresholds.

Abstract

In this work, we explore the potential benefits of deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (ABSs) with sub-6GHz band and small cells terrestrial base stations (TBSs) with millimeter wave (mmWave) band in a hybrid heterogeneous networks (HetNets). A flexible non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based user association policy is proposed. By using the tools from stochastic geometry, new analytical expressions for association probability, coverage probability and spectrum efficiency are derived for characterizing the performance of UAV-aided HetNets under the realistic Air-to-Ground (A2G) channels and the Ground-to-Ground (G2G) channels with a LoS ball blockage model. Finally, we provide insights on the proposed hybrid HetNets by numerical results. We confirm that i) the proposed NOMA enabled HetNets is capable of achieving superior performance compared with the OMA enabled ABSs by setting power allocation factors and targeted signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold properly; ii) there is a tradeoff between the association probabilities and the spectrum efficiency in the NOMA enabled ABSs tier; iii) the coverage probability and spectrum efficiency of the NOMA enabled ABSs tier is largely affected by the imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC) coefficient, power allocation factors and SINR threshold; iv) compared with only sub-6GHz ABSs, mmWave enabled TBSs are capable of enhancing the spectrum efficiency of the HetNets when the mmWave line-of-sight (LoS) link is available.