Abstract
The application of drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles deployed as unmanned aerial base stations (UABSs), has received extensive interest for public safety communications (PSC) to fill the coverage gaps and establish ubiquitous connectivity. In this article, we design a PSC LTE-Advanced air–ground-based HetNet (AG-HetNet) that is a scenario representation of a geographical area during and after a disaster. As part of the AG-HetNet infrastructure, we have UABSs and ground user equipment (GUE) flocking together in clusters at safe places or evacuation shelters. AG-HetNet uses cell range expansion (CRE), intercell interference coordination (ICIC), and 3D beamforming techniques to ensure ubiquitous connectivity. Through system-level simulations and using a brute-force technique, we evaluate the performance of the AG-HetNet in terms of fifth-percentile spectral efficiency (5pSE) and coverage probability. We compare system-wide 5pSE and coverage probability when UABSs are deployed on a hexagonal grid and for different clustering distributions of GUEs. The results show that reduced power subframes (FeICIC) defined in 3GPP Release-11 can provide practical gains in 5pSE and coverage probability than the 3GPP Release-10 with almost blank subframes (eICIC).
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