On the Downlink SINR Meta Distribution of UAV-assisted Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of UAV deployment on wireless network reliability using the SINR meta distribution, revealing that UAVs generally improve reliability but high LoS probability can sometimes decrease it, especially at high SINR thresholds.

Contribution

First application of SINR meta distribution to UAV-assisted networks, deriving moments and approximations to evaluate reliability improvements from UAV deployment.

Findings

UAV deployment significantly enhances network reliability for clustered users.

High LoS probability can reduce system reliability at high SINR thresholds.

UAVs enable highly reliable links in urban high-rise environments.

Abstract

The meta distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) provides fine-grained information about each link's performance in a wireless system and the reliability of the whole network. While the UAV-enabled network has been studied extensively, most of the works focus on the spatial average performance, such as coverage probability, while SINR meta distribution has received less attention. In this paper, we use the SINR meta distribution for the first time to systematically analyze the improvement and the influence of deploying UAVs on the reliability of a wireless network. We first derive the $b$-th moments of the conditional success probability of the UAV-enabled network and give the approximated expressions derived by Gil-Pelaez theorem and the beta approximation of the meta distribution. Our numerical results show that deploying UAVs in wireless networks in most cases can greatly improve the system reliability, which denotes the fraction of users achieving cellular coverage, especially for the spatially-clustered users. In addition, establishing LoS links is not always beneficial since it also increases the interference. For instance, with the increase of the SINR threshold, the system reliability of a high LoS probability environment decreases dramatically and it is even lower than a low LoS probability environment. We also show that in highrise urban areas, UAVs can help in establishing extremely reliable (very high SINR) links.