Coverage Analysis for UAV-Assisted Cellular Networks in Rural Areas

TL;DR

This paper develops a stochastic geometry model to analyze how UAV-assisted aerial base stations can improve cellular coverage in rural and peripheral areas, addressing coverage disparities in next-generation wireless networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inhomogeneous Poisson point process model to realistically capture coverage variation across urban, suburban, and rural regions with UAV deployment.

Findings

Low-density UAVs significantly improve rural coverage.

Coverage probability increases with UAV density and exclusion zone size.

Model enables realistic assessment of UAV deployment benefits.

Abstract

Despite coverage enhancement in rural areas is one of the main requirements in next generations of wireless networks (i.e., 5G and 6G), the low expected profit prevents telecommunication providers from investing in such sparsely populated areas. Hence, it is required to design and deploy cost efficient alternatives for extending the cellular infrastructure to these regions. A concrete mathematical model that characterizes and clearly captures the aforementioned problem might be a key-enabler for studying the efficiency of any potential solution. Unfortunately, the commonly used mathematical tools that model large scale wireless networks are not designed to capture the unfairness, in terms of cellular coverage, suffered by exurban and rural areas. In big cities, in fact, cellular deployment is essentially capacity driven and thus cellular base station densities are maximum in the town centers and decline when getting far from them. In this paper, a new stochastic geometry-based model is implemented in order to show the coverage spatial variation among urban, suburban, and exurban settlements. Indeed, by implementing inhomogeneous Poisson point processes (PPPs) it is possible to study the performance metrics in a realistic scenario where terrestrial base stations (TBSs) are clustered around the urban center while outer aerial base stations (ABSs) are uniformly distributed outside an urban exclusion zone. Based on this, our simulation results can quantify the improvement, in terms of coverage probability, that even a surprisingly low density of ABSs can bring to peripheral regions depending on the extension of the exclusion zone, enabling us to draw insightful considerations.