Non-Terrestrial Networks for UAVs: Base Station Service Provisioning Schemes with Antenna Tilt

TL;DR

This paper analyzes UAV communication in non-terrestrial networks, comparing service schemes with antenna tilt considerations, deriving outage probabilities, and identifying optimal tilt angles for improved network performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of BS service provisioning schemes considering antenna tilt, deriving outage probabilities, and determining optimal tilt angles for UAV and ground user services.

Findings

Optimal antenna tilt angle minimizes outage probability.

Inclusive-service scheme benefits dense UAV environments.

Exclusive-service scheme is better for ground-dominated networks.

Abstract

By focusing on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), this paper provides a guideline on the appropriate base station (BS) service provisioning scheme with considering the antenna tilt angle of BS. Specifically, two service provisioning schemes are considered including the inclusive-service BS (IS-BS) scheme, which makes BSs serve both ground users (GUs) and aerial users (AUs) (i.e., UAVs) simultaneously, and the exclusive-service BS (ES-BS) scheme, which has BSs for GUs and BSs for AUs. By considering the antenna tilt angle-based channel gain, we derive the network outage probability for both IS-BS and ES-BS schemes, and show the existence of the optimal tilt angle that minimizes the network outage probability after analyzing the conflict impact of the antenna tilt angle. We also analyze the impact of various network parameters, including the ratio of GUs to total users and densities of total and interfering BSs, on the network outage probability. Finally, we analytically and numerically show in which environments each service provisioning scheme can be superior to the other one.