Dynamic Standalone Drone-Mounted Small Cells

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of dynamic positioning of drone-mounted small cells with directional antennas to optimize coverage and rate improvements, demonstrating feasibility and potential gains in various user density scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a closed-form expression for rate improvement with antenna tilting and evaluates three D-HOP techniques for drone small cells with directional antennas.

Findings

Rate improvements of 20-35% in low-density scenarios.

Feasibility of D-HOP with tiltable antennas in drone small cells.

Optimal positioning techniques depend on user distribution and antenna characteristics.

Abstract

This paper investigates the feasibility of Dynamic Horizontal Opportunistic Positioning (D-HOP) use in Drone Small Cells (DSCs), with a central analysis on the impact of antenna equipment efficiency onto the optimal DSC altitude that has been chosen in favor of maximizing coverage. We extend the common urban propagation model of an isotropic antenna to account for a directional antenna, making it dependent on the antenna's ability to fit the ideal propagation pattern. This leads us to define a closed-form expression for calculating the Rate improvement of D-HOP implementations that maintain constant coverage through antenna tilting. Assuming full knowledge of the uniformly distributed active users' locations, three D-HOP techniques were tested: in the center of the Smallest Bounding Circle (SBC); the point of Maximum Aggregated Rate (MAR); and the Center-Most Point (CMP) out of the two aforementioned. Through analytic study and simulation we infer that DSC D-HOP implementations are feasible when using electrically small and tiltable antennas. Nonetheless, it is possible to achieve average per user average rate increases of up to 20-35% in low user density scenarios, or 3-5% in user-dense scenarios, even when using efficient antennas in a DSC that has been designed for standalone coverage.