Backhaul For Low-Altitude UAVs in Urban Environments

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) acting as access points in cellular networks require wireless backhauls to the core network. In this paper we employ stochastic geometry to carry out an analysis of the UAV backhaul performance that can be achieved with a network of dedicated ground stations. We provide analytical expressions for the probability of successfully establishing a backhaul and the expected data rate over the backhaul link, given either an LTE or a millimeter-wave backhaul. We demonstrate that increasing the density of the ground station network gives diminishing returns on the performance of the UAV backhaul, and that for an LTE backhaul the ground stations can benefit from being colocated with an existing base station network

A Distributed Approach for Networked Flying Platform Association with Small Cells in 5G+ Networks

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.Comment: Submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, 7 pages and 4 figure

Performance Analysis of Micro Unmanned Airborne Communication Relays for Cellular Networks

This paper analyses the potential of utilising small unmanned-aerial-vehicles (SUAV) as wireless relays for assisting cellular network performance. Whilst high altitude wireless relays have been investigated over the past 2 decades, the new class of low cost SUAVs offers new possibilities for addressing local traffic imbalances and providing emergency coverage.We present field-test results from an SUAV test-bed in both urban and rural environments. The results show that trough-to-peak throughput improvements can be achieved for users in poor coverage zones. Furthermore, the paper reinforces the experimental study with large-scale network analysis using both stochastic geometry and multi-cell simulation results.Comment: conferenc