A 3D Tractable Model for UAV-Enabled Cellular Networks With Multiple Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 3D point process model for UAV deployment in cellular networks, enabling tractable analysis of network performance and coverage, especially with multiple antennas and cell-free massive MIMO configurations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel 3D point process model based on 2D Poisson processes for UAV deployment, facilitating practical 3D channel modeling and performance analysis.

Findings

Closed-form expressions for coverage probability

Analysis of fundamental limits with cell-free massive MIMO

Validation of model through numerical simulations

Abstract

This paper aims to propose a three-dimensional (3D) point process model that can be employed to generally deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a large-scale cellular network and tractably analyze the fundamental network-wide performances of the network. The proposed 3D point process is devised based on a 2D homogeneous marked Poisson point process (PPP) in which each point and its random mark uniquely correspond to the projection and the altitude of each point in the 3D point process, respectively. We study some of the important statistical properties of the proposed 3D point process and shed light on some crucial insights into these properties that facilitate the analyses of a UAV-enabled cellular network wherein all the UAVs equipped with multiple antennas are deployed by the proposed 3D point process to serve as aerial base stations. The salient features of the proposed 3D point process lie in its suitability in practical 3D channel modeling and tractability in analysis. The downlink coverage performances of the UAV-enabled cellular network are analyzed and found in neat expressions and their closed-form results for some special cases are also derived. Most importantly, their fundamental limits achieved by cell-free massive antenna array are characterized when coordinating all the UAVs to jointly perform non-coherent downlink transmission. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate some of the key findings in this paper.