Modeling and Analysis of Air-Ground Integrated Networks With Flexible Beam Coverage

Abstract

Air platforms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, airships, and balloons are expected to complement traditional ground networks to provide flexible coverage solutions. However, most existing models for air-ground integrated networks (AGINs) neglect the spatial dependence caused by the complementary deployment of the aerial and ground nodes. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose two AGIN models with horizontal dependence that differ in the vertical dimension, namely uniformly independent altitudes and location-dependent altitudes. The air platforms serve as aerial base stations, distributed as a marked Poisson hole process, and provide flexible beam coverage through varying altitudes. Under this setup, we propose a region-based user association scheme and derive the association probabilities as well as the serving distance distributions of an arbitrarily located user. Considering Nakagami fading and air-to-ground propagation properties, we characterize the signal-to-interference ratio and area spectral efficiency for each model. Using the proposed analytical framework, we demonstrate the importance of deploying the air platforms more sensibly to provide targeted services and flexible beam coverage in reducing the load of base stations and improving the user coverage and network capacity performance.