IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Multi-UAV Assisted Multi-Tier Millimeter-Wave Cellular Networks for Hotspots With 2-Tier and 4-Tier Network Association

  • Pengshan Ji,
  • Xiangdong Jia,
  • Yi Lu,
  • Haixia Hu,
  • Yuhua Ouyang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3019320
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 158972 – 158995

Abstract

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The evolution of the fifth-generation (5G)/ beyond 5G (B5G) mobile communication networks greatly depends on the seamless integration of terrestrial and sky networks over advanced multi-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) infrastructure. By using the huge potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and mm-Wave, we develop a novel and practical multi-UAV assisted multi-tier HetNet model which consists of clustered aerial UAV base stations (U-BSs) and Poisson point process (PPP) based ground BSs (G-BSs) for emergency and crowded hotspot area. In a typical cluster, both ground user equipments (GUEs) and UAVs are modeled as Poisson cluster process (PCP) and scattered around the common cluster center. Specially, the analysis is conducted by adding two additional tiers which consist of multiple intra-cluster U-BSs and single G-BS in representative cluster so that the point sets of U-BSs and G-BSs are partitioned into two sub-sets, respectively, and a 4-tier network model is formed. To find the contribution of the inter-cluster associations on the performance of networks, we construct 2-tier and 4-tier association schemes. The 2-tier association allows a GUE associated only with intra-cluster U-BSs and G-BS, while the 4-tier association allows all inter/intra-cluster U-BSs and G-BSs can be associated. Then, according to stochastic geometry methods, statistical description of the downlink interferences experienced at a typical GUE is derived. This derivation yields the downlink coverage probabilities and total network throughput are obtained. It is achieved that association probabilities greatly depend on the distribution of daughter point process. UAVs' height and the distributions of U-BSs and GUEs impose non-monotonous impact on coverage probabilities. Due to severe inter-cluster interference, the achievable average area throughput is not always increasing with SINR so that there is an optimal SINR threshold. In addition, our analysis finds the proposed 4-tier association scheme outperforms the simple 2-tier one in terms of the average area throughput.

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