Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications: Performance and Tradeoffs

Abstract

In this paper, the deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a flying\nbase station used to provide on the fly wireless communications to a given\ngeographical area is analyzed. In particular, the co-existence between the UAV,\nthat is transmitting data in the downlink, and an underlaid device-todevice\n(D2D) communication network is considered. For this model, a tractable\nanalytical framework for the coverage and rate analysis is derived. Two\nscenarios are considered: a static UAV and a mobile UAV. In the first scenario,\nthe average coverage probability and the system sum-rate for the users in the\narea are derived as a function of the UAV altitude and the number of D2D users.\nIn the second scenario, using the disk covering problem, the minimum number of\nstop points that the UAV needs to visit in order to completely cover the area\nis computed. Furthermore, considering multiple retransmissions for the UAV and\nD2D users, the overall outage probability of the D2D users is derived.\nSimulation and analytical results show that, depending on the density of D2D\nusers, optimal values for the UAV altitude exist for which the system sum-rate\nand the coverage probability are maximized. Moreover, our results also show\nthat, by enabling the UAV to intelligently move over the target area, the total\nrequired transmit power of UAV while covering the entire area, is minimized.\nFinally, in order to provide a full coverage for the area of interest, the\ntradeoff between the coverage and delay, in terms of the number of stop points,\nis discussed.\n