Analysis of Using Drone-Base Stations on the Performance of Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Abstract

Deploying new base stations is being used as an effective solution to satisfy the tremendous increase in mobile traffic. However, this solution is costly due to temporal and spatial variation of traffic, where mobile network operators need to deploy base stations that may work for limited periods of the day. Due to its high flexibility, low deployment time and possibility to be used in more than one location, the usage of drone base stations is a promising alternative that can reduce the operational cost of the network while providing higher bitrates compared to traditional approach. In this paper, we study the impact of using drone base stations on the performance of a cellular network. We consider a heterogeneous architecture composed of a macro-base station overlaid with base stations serving small cells. For the small cells, we compare two scenarios; the first corresponds to a specific number of fixed small base stations while the second corresponds to variable number of drone base stations serving small cells. Results show that a small number of drone base stations can replace large number of fixed ones. Moreover, using smaller number of drone base stations compared to fixed ones increases the average bit rate of the users and capacity per unit of energy up to 75 and 78 percentage points respectively.