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UAV Assisted Cellular Communications

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Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications over Cellular Networks for 5G and Beyond

Part of the book series: Wireless Networks ((WN))

Abstract

Dedicated UAVs can be used as communication platforms in the way as wireless access points or relays nodes, to further assist the terrestrial communications. This type of applications can be referred to as UAV assisted cellular communications. UAV assisted cellular communications have numerous use cases, including traffic offloading, wireless backhauling, swift service recovery after natural disasters, emergency response, rescue and search, information dissemination/broadcasting, and data collection from ground sensors for machine-type communications. However, different from traditional cellular networks, how to plan the time-variant placements of the UAVs served as BS/relay is very challenging due to the complicated 3D propagation environments as well as many other practical constraints such as power and flying speed. In addition, spectrum sharing with existing cellular networks is another interesting topic to investigate.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The length of each time slots can be around a few seconds since our algorithm has a high efficiency.

  2. 2.

    The power consumption of wireless transmission can be ignored compared to that of the engines of the UAV [4].

  3. 3.

    Small-scale fading is ignored, since we only use average SNR to determine which UAV or MBS the user should connect to.

  4. 4.

    We assume that each potential user has an independent probability to become an active user at each moment. Therefore, the number of active users in a certain area should be a binomial distributed random variable. When the number of users in each area is large enough (> 100), Poisson distribution is a good approximation of binomial distribution without the loss of accuracy.

  5. 5.

    In addition, by deleting unnecessary values in Table 3.2, we can resolve a whole contract with M = 300 in only 1 s.

  6. 6.

    Based on Fig. 3.3, although Social Welfare =  Revenue of the MBS Manager +  Total Profits of all the UAVs, we can also express it as Social Welfare =  Total Utilities of all the UAVs − Cost of the MBS Manager, just as given in Eq. (3.32).

  7. 7.

    The same method can also be applied to the UAV relay with the DF protocol as shown in [39].

  8. 8.

    With total power constraint, the optimal power solution that minimizes the outage probability can be obtained with various MD-UAV and UAV-BS distances ratios. It also guarantees that the maximum power efficiency can be reached with different transmission distances scenarios [35].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Hongliang Zhang & Lingyang Song

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Zhu Han

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  1. Hongliang Zhang
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  2. Lingyang Song
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Zhang, H., Song, L., Han, Z. (2020). UAV Assisted Cellular Communications. In: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Applications over Cellular Networks for 5G and Beyond. Wireless Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33039-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33039-2_3

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