On the Tradeoffs Between Coverage Radius, Altitude, and Beamwidth for Practical UAV Deployments

Abstract

Current studies on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based cellular deployment consider UAVs as aerial base stations for air-to-ground communication. However, they analyze UAV coverage radius and altitude interplay while omitting or oversimplifying an important aspect of UAV deployment, i.e., effect of a realistic antenna pattern. This paper addresses the UAV deployment problem while using a realistic 3D directional antenna model. New trade-offs between UAV design space dimensions are revealed and analyzed in different scenarios. The sensitivity of coverage area to both antenna beamwidth and height is compared. The analysis is extended to multiple UAVs and a new packing scheme is proposed for multiple UAVs coverage that offers several advantages compared to prior approaches.

Multi-Area Throughput and Energy Optimization of UAV-Aided Cellular Networks Powered by Solar Panels and Grid

“…To ease the notation, we remove the indexes when the parameter/variable has to be passed/retrieved entirely from/to a routine of the algorithm. As suggested by its name, the main goal of BBSR is to balance the different terms of the objective function in (14), by selectively scheduling the UAV-SCs missions, the BW release, the BW assignment, and the energy that is exchanged with the grid. To pursue this goal, BBSR applies a divide-et-impera approach, which is detailed below.…”

“…9 reports the values of the objective function of Eq. (14), which is produced as output by J-MATE, BBSR, and computed with a postprocessing step with MC-NES and NC. The figure shows the impact of the throughput weight R RATE on the total objective.…”

Multi-Tier Variable Height UAV Networks: User Coverage and Throughput Optimization

“…Most of the existing literature considered UAV-assisted networks based on the assumptions of a guaranteed LoS connection (e.g., [18], [19]). Also, the use of directional antennas is considered whereas effect of interference is often neglected [20]. A similar optimal UAV deployment method in a square region is proposed in [7], assuming all links in the region were LoS and directional antennas are used for coverage maximization.…”

“…A circle packing based decision mechanism in a square region is also proposed by Gao et al [30] for an AtG collaborative vehicular network to maximize the coverage while minimizing the energy consumed by the small drone cells. The work in [20] exploited three equalsize circles to compare and contrast with hexagon packing to exhibit an interplay among the radius, height and beamwidth of practical UAV systems.…”

“…• We develop a fractional frequency reuse (FFR) technique to manage the interference in the proposed variable-height UAV based network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper where circle packing and FFR have been exploited to manage interference where omnidirectional antennas are used, contrasting with [5], [7], [20] which only focused on equal-size circle packing models using directional antennas and with [17], where omnidirectional antennas are used without modelling the interference. To this end, we optimize the FFR cell partitions to maximize the area spectral efficiency (ASE) of the network and compare the optimal results of the models for a given set of UAVs.…”