Optimal deployment density for maximum coverage of drone small cells

Abstract

With the proliferation of small and mini drones, Drone Small Cells (DSCs) can cooperative multiple drones to provide communication service for ground users as emergency means or supplementary ones of traditional terrestrial cellular networks. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of optimizing the deployment density of DSCs to achieve the maximum coverage performance. Most related works do not consider cumulative inter-cell interference when studying the coverage performance of DSCs. First, we derive an approximate and closed-form expression of the cumulative inter-cell interference which comes from both probabilistic Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) links. Then, we analyze the coverage performance of DSCs and derive the transcendental function of optimal deployment density to obtain the maximum coverage. Last, we propose an algorithm to get the optimal deployment density with low complexity. We conduct both field experiments and Matlab simulations to verify the correctness of theoretical analysis. In addition, we show the impact of some factors on the relation between the deployment density and coverage performance through extensive numerical simulations.