Dedicating Cellular Infrastructure for Aerial Users: Advantages and Potential Impact on Ground Users

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how adjusting cellular base station antenna tilts to serve aerial users can improve coverage for drones and similar vehicles without harming ground user service, using stochastic geometry models.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical framework quantifying the coverage benefits of up-tilted antennas for aerial users in cellular networks.

Findings

Up-tilting antennas enhances aerial user coverage.

The analysis shows minimal impact on ground user QoS.

Exact and approximate coverage probability expressions are derived.

Abstract

A new generation of aerial vehicles is hopeful to be the next frontier for the transportation of people and goods, becoming even as important as ground users in the communication systems. To enhance the coverage of aerial users, appropriate adjustments should be made to the existing cellular networks that mainly provide services for ground users by the down-tilted antennas of the terrestrial base stations (BSs). It is promising to up-tilt the antennas of a subset of BSs for serving aerial users through the mainlobe. With this motivation, in this work, we use tools from stochastic geometry to analyze the coverage performance of the adjusted cellular network (consisting of the up-tilted BSs and the down-tilted BSs). Correspondingly, we present exact and approximate expressions of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR)-based coverage probabilities for users in the sky and on the ground, respectively. Numerical results verify the analysis accuracy and clarify the advantages of up-tilting BS antennas on the communication connectivity of aerial users without the potential adverse impact on the quality of service (QoS) of ground users.