Hover or Perch: Comparing Capacity of Airborne and Landed Millimeter-Wave UAV Cells

TL;DR

This paper compares airborne and landed millimeter-wave UAV access points, evaluating their performance trade-offs considering drone battery life, deployment distance, and network demands for 5G+ networks.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical framework to compare UAV airborne and landed deployments, accounting for full operation cycles and providing insights for efficient 5G+ network deployment.

Findings

Landed UAV APs can be more efficient than airborne ones under certain conditions.

Deployment distance and drone battery life significantly influence system performance.

The methodology aids in optimizing UAV-based mmWave AP deployments for 5G+ networks.

Abstract

On-demand deployments of millimeter-wave (mmWave) access points (APs) carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are considered today as a potential solution to enhance the performance of 5G+ networks. The battery lifetime of modern UAVs, though, limits the flight times in such systems. In this letter, we evaluate a feasible deployment alternative for temporary capacity boost in the areas with highly fluctuating user demands. The approach is to land UAV-based mmWave APs on the nearby buildings instead of hovering over the area. Within the developed mathematical framework, we compare the system-level performance of airborne and landed deployments by taking into account the full operation cycle of the employed drones. Our numerical results demonstrate that the choice of the UAV deployment option is determined by an interplay of the separation distance between the service area and the UAV charging station, drone battery lifetime, and the number of aerial APs in use. The presented methodology and results can support efficient on-demand deployments of UAV-based mmWave APs in prospective 5G+ networks.