Hybrid-Mode Multiple Access for UAV-BS Assisted Communications with UL-DL Rate Balancing

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base station (BS) assisted communication system for a special event (e.g., a football game) with heterogeneous traffic demands by all users and the uplink (UL)-downlink (DL) rate balancing requirement. With respect to UAV’s high mobility, we propose a hybrid mode multiple access (HMMA) strategy where both orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques are utilized to meet heterogeneous traffic demands. Specifically, NOMA is utilized to achieve high average data rate, and OMA helps to meet the instantaneous rate demands of users. The proposed HMMA strategy has a high degree of freedom and provides superior minimum average rate across all users and a higher user fairness than the previous work with OMA only or NOMA only, where the instantaneous rate demands of users may not always be guaranteed during UAV’s flight time due to dynamic channel changes, the inter-user interference and successive interference cancellation (SIC) error propagation. Furthermore, we investigate joint UL-DL optimization for a UAV assisted wireless system. Based on the channel reciprocity of the air-ground channels, an alternative algorithm is proposed to conduct joint UL-DL optimization of bandwidth assignment and UAV trajectory to accommodate heterogeneous rate demands across users and achieve quasi-balanced average rates in UL and DL.