Outage Analysis for Millimeter-Wave Fronthaul Link of UAV-Aided Wireless Networks

Gianluca Fontanesi,Anding Zhu,Hamed Ahmadi

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3001342

Gianluca Fontanesi, Anding Zhu + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3001342

Copy DOI

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-wireless networks represent a promising solution to expand the reach of mobile connectivity beyond current boundaries. When Distributed Units (DUs) are deployed on the UAV, the high rate requirement on the wireless Fronthaul (FH) link between the UAV-DU and the terrestrial network poses a major challenge. To address the capacity demand of the FH network, we investigate the outage probability at millimeter Wave (mmWave) and sub-6 GHz frequency for different blockage environments and UAV heights. Utilizing a stochastic geometry framework, we first derive analytical approximate expressions for the outage probability of the FH link and we observe generally a good agreement with the simulation results for different UAV heights. In addition, numerical results for different urban densities show that the FH outage probability is minimized choosing an optimal UAV-DU altitude. We further analyze the impact of the antenna gain for two candidate mmWave frequencies on the FH link. High mmWave bands need sharp directional beamforming and large transmit bandwidth to outperform low mmWave bands in term of rate outage. Finally, our results show the impact on the outage probability of the FH overhead, that scales with the number of antenna elements, for different protocol splits.

Highlights

T RADITIONAL Base Stations (BSs), due to their stationary location and low flexibility, are not optimized to satisfy the service requirements of applications such as search and rescue, disaster aid and reconnaissance
NUMERICAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION we show the numerical results for the outage probability expressions derived above
We consider for our simulations Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) able to cope with that payload

Summary

Introduction

T RADITIONAL Base Stations (BSs), due to their stationary location and low flexibility, are not optimized to satisfy the service requirements of applications such as search and rescue, disaster aid and reconnaissance. Given the intrinsic limitations of UAV payload and battery capacity, it is desirable to keep the computational complexity and the energy consumption on the UAV as low as possible This can be achieved by adopting a distributed configuration, where only the Radio Frequency (RF) functions are performed at the UAV. If only the DU is deployed on the body of the UAV, the payload becomes smaller and lighter, which can result in more efficient use of processing resources and reduced energy consumption. In this distributed system, the link connecting the aerial DU to the ground CU is conventionally referred as Fronthaul (FH).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion