372 research outputs found
Improving Performance of Mobile Networks Using Drone-Mounted Flying Base Stations
Recent advancements in drone technology and base station miniaturization, together with an urgent need to reduce site rental costs, have created the unique opportunity to deploy cellular networks on a platform of mobile drones. This new development is redefining the wireless networks, as drone base stations can autonomously move in space to improve coverage and capacity of the network, tremendously enhancing the Quality of Service for conventional cell-edge users.
In this research, we explore the benefit of constantly moving drone base stations in the air to reduce the distance between the base stations and the mobile user equipments, thereby improving the performance of the cellular networks.
In particular, this thesis makes three fundamental contributions.
First, we analyse drone manoeuvrability using theory, emulation and real field experiments to find the relationship between flying speed, turning agility and energy consumption. Under the control of our developed Android program, we reveal some practical manoeuvrability factors that must be considered for the applications that require frequent changes of direction for the drone. Second, we propose drone mobility control algorithms to decide on drones' moving directions in order to improve the performance of drone base stations in the network area. As the optimal problem is NP-hard, we propose a range of practically realizable heuristics with varying complexity and performance. The proposed algorithms are evaluated taking the practical drones' limitations into account for micro hotspots scenario where many hotspots exist next to each other and a drone is deployed over each hotspot area. We show that our proposed heuristic algorithms can readily improve spectral efficiency by 34% and the 5th-percentile packet throughput by 50% compared to the scenario where drones hover over fixed locations. Third, we consider macro hotspot scenario, where users and drones can move freely in a large area. Particular challenges such as user association and physical collision among drones are addressed. We show that our proposed algorithms can achieve a significant 67\% packet throughput and 343% 5th-percentile packet throughput improvement for macro hotspot scenario. We further demonstrate that our proposed algorithms are robust against the various drone base station and user densities in the network area, and huge improvement can be achieved.
We believe that our findings in this thesis shed new light on the fundamental benefits of drone base stations in the next generation cellular networks
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
Recharging of Flying Base Stations using Airborne RF Energy Sources
This paper presents a new method for recharging flying base stations, carried
by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), using wireless power transfer from
dedicated, airborne, Radio Frequency (RF) energy sources. In particular, we
study a system in which UAVs receive wireless power without being disrupted
from their regular trajectory. The optimal placement of the energy sources are
studied so as to maximize received power from the energy sources by the
receiver UAVs flying with a linear trajectory over a square area. We find that
for our studied scenario of two UAVs, if an even number of energy sources are
used, placing them in the optimal locations maximizes the total received power,
while achieving fairness among the UAVs. However, in the case of using an odd
number of energy sources, we can either maximize the total received power, or
achieve fairness, but not both at the same time. Numerical results show that
placing the energy sources at the suggested optimal locations results in
significant power gain compared to nonoptimal placements.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, conference pape
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) Communications in Wireless Cellular Networks
An integrated access and backhaul (IAB) network architecture can enable flexible and fast deployment of next-generation cellular networks. However, mutual interference between access and backhaul links, small inter-site distance and spatial dynamics of user distribution pose major challenges in the practical deployment of IAB networks. To tackle these problems, we leverage the flying capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as hovering IAB-nodes and propose an interference management algorithm to maximize the overall sum rate of the IAB network. In particular, we jointly optimize the user and base station associations, the downlink power allocations for access and backhaul transmissions, and the spatial configurations of UAVs. We consider two spatial configuration modes of UAVs: distributed UAVs and drone antenna array (DAA), and show how they are intertwined with the spatial distribution of ground users. Our numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average of 2.9ร and 6.7ร gains in the received downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and overall network sum rate, respectively. Finally, the numerical results reveal that UAVs cannot only be used for coverage improvement but also for capacity boosting in IAB cellular networks
Exploiting UAV as NOMA based relay for coverage extension
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) aided communication
has acquired research interest in many civilian and
military applications. The use of UAV as base stations and as
aerial relays to improve coverage of existing cellular networks is prevalent in current literature. Along with this, a few studies have proposed the use of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in UAV communications. In this paper, we propose a network where a ground user and an aerial UAV relay is accessed using NOMA, where the UAV acts as decode-and-forward (DF) relay to extend the coverage of source. The performance of the proposed
model is shown by evaluating outage behaviour for different
transmit power and fading environments with Monte Carlo
simulations. System throughput of proposed network appears to be better than orthogonal multiple access (OMA) based equivalent network. The results show that with an adequate height of the UAV NOMA based relay, quality of service (QoS) of cell edge user is satisfactory
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