Directional antennas modelling and coverage analysis for UAV networks with blockage effects in urban environment

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations (BSs) has attracted widespread attention in both academia and industry. Most of the existing research on UAV networks in dense urban environment focus on omnidirectional antenna patterns, which results in severe interference and overlapping between coverage area due to dominant line‐of‐sight (LOS) links. This paper proposed a directional antennas model with tunable beamwidth and blockage effects in urban UAV networks, and derive the coverage probability of UAV networks in dense urban environment by stochastic geometry tools, where UAVs and users are deployed according to independent Poisson point process (PPP). Specifically, a realistic and mathematically tractable directional antenna pattern is adopted and radiation gain is modelled by a continuous function of the elevation angle . In addition, the blockage effects of the buildings are considered by establishing a three‐dimensional blockage model where buildings are distributed according to PPP with heights followed by Rayleigh distribution. Numerical results match well with simulations and provide optimal deployment parameters for UAV deployments.