Optimal Deployment and Operation of Robotic Aerial 6G Small Cells with Grasping End Effectors

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-neutral robotic airborne base station with grasping end-effectors that autonomously perches on urban landforms, optimizing deployment and operation to outperform fixed small cells in serving user traffic.

Contribution

It introduces a novel RABS system with grasping end-effectors and an ILP-based optimization framework for deployment and operation decisions.

Findings

A single RABS can outperform five fixed small cells in traffic served.

The proposed ILP and heuristic effectively optimize RABS deployment and operation.

Numerical results demonstrate significant performance gains over fixed small cells.

Abstract

Although airborne base stations (ABSs) mounted on drones show a significant potential to enhance network capacity and coverage due to their flexible deployment, the system performance is severely limited by the endurance of the on-board battery. To overcome this key shortcoming, we are exploring robotic airborne base station (RABS) with energy neutral grasping end-effectors able to autonomously perch at tall urban landforms. This paper studies the optimal deployment (fly to another grasping location or remain in the same one) and operation (active or sleep at an epoch) of RABS based on the spatio-temporal characteristics of underlying traffic demand from end-users. Specifically, an integer linear programming (ILP) is formulated by exploiting the coupling between these two decisions, that is, the RABS only needs to visit the locations where it is active. A Lagrangian heuristic algorithm is then proposed by exploiting the totally unimodular structure of the ILP formulation. A wide set of numerical investigations reveal that thanks to its mobility, a single robotic aerial small cell is able to outperform five (5) fixed small cells in terms of served user generated traffic within a 16 to 41 hours period.