Coverage Performance of Aerial-Terrestrial HetNets

Providing seamless coverage in current cellular network technologies is surmountable only through gross over-engineering. Alternatively, as an economically effective solution, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), augmented with the functionalities of terrestrial base stations (BSs), is recently advocated. In this paper we investigate the effect that the incorporation of UAV-mounted BSs (U-BS) poses on the coverage probability of cellular networks. To this end, we focus on the evaluation of the coverage probability of a large-scale aerial-terrestrial heterogenous cellular network (AT-HetNet), in which BSs of each technology/tier can be either ground (G-BS) or UBS. Our analysis incorporates the impact of Line-of-Sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) path-loss attenuations of both ground-to-ground (G2G) and Air-to-Ground (A2G) links. Adopting tools of stochastic geometry we then obtain the coverage probability as a function of main system parameters and percentage of BSs in each tier that are aerial. Using simulations we also confirm the accuracy of our analysis. We further observe that for several common communication environments, e.g., high-rise and dense urban environments, the inclusion of U-BSs can be detrimental to the coverage probability. Nevertheless, it is still possible to minimize the coverage cost by turning off a percentage of G-BSs. Interestingly, for urban and sub-urban areas one can adjust the altitude of U-BSs in order to adjust the coverage probability.