Impacts of Antenna Downtilt and Backhaul Connectivity on the UAV-Enabled Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

The performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled networks is generally bottlenecked by severe inter-cell interference and limited backhaul connectivity. Against this backdrop, we analyze the performance of the UAV-enabled heterogeneous networks, where antenna downtilt at each UAV-mounted BS is employed to mitigate inter-cell interference, and the tethered UAV (TUAV)-mounted BS is deployed to provide backhaul connectivity for multiple spatially randomly distributed untethered UAV-mounted BSs, while they are cooperatively serving the terrestrial users. Through leveraging stochastic geometry, the user association probability and conditional distance distributions of serving links are derived. Then, the compact expressions of coverage probability and ergodic rate of the UAV-enabled heterogeneous networks are derived, and the impacts of antenna downtilt and backhaul connectivity are investigated. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the effectiveness of antenna downtilt and the TUAV-enabled backhaul connectivity. Moreover, we find that a larger antenna downtilt angle is required for a higher deployment altitude. We show that the optimal size of the network area that maximizes the average coverage probability reduces, when the backhaul connectivity is considered. We also demonstrate that the average network performance can be significantly improved by judiciously selecting the number of untethered UAVs, which is closely related to the the size of the network area. Finally, the advantage of the proposed UAV-enabled heterogeneous network on the average ergodic rate has been validated by comparing it with two benchmarks under the 3GPP channel model.