Non-Terrestrial Networks for UAVs: Base Station Service Provisioning Schemes With Antenna Tilt

Abstract

By focusing on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), this paper provides a guideline on the appropriate base station (BS) service provisioning scheme with considering the antenna tilt angle of BSs. Specifically, two service provisioning schemes are considered including the inclusive-service BS (IS-BS) scheme, which makes BSs serve both ground users (GUs) and aerial users (AUs) (i.e., UAVs) simultaneously, and the exclusive-service BS (ES-BS) scheme, which has BSs for GUs and BSs for AUs. By considering the antenna tilt angle-based channel gain, we derive the network outage probability for both IS-BS and ES-BS schemes and show the existence of the optimal tilt angle that minimizes the network outage probability after analyzing the conflict impact of the antenna tilt angle. We also analyze the impact of various network parameters, including the ratio of GUs to total users and densities of total and interfering BSs, on the network outage probability. Finally, we analytically and numerically show in which environments each service provisioning scheme can be superior to the other one.

Keywords

• Non-terrestrial network
• unmanned aerial vehicle
• antenna tilt angle
• line-of-sight (LoS) probability
• outage probability