Latency Aware Drone Base Station Placement in Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Different from traditional static small cells, Drone Base Stations (DBSs) exhibit their own advantages, i.e., faster and cheaper to deploy, more flexibly reconfigured, and likely to have better communications channels owing to the presence of short-range line-of-sight links. Thus, applying DBSs into the cellular network has great potential to increase the throughput of the network and improve Quality of Service (QoS) of Mobile Users (MUs). In this paper, we focus on how to place the DBS (i.e., jointly determining the location and the association coverage of a DBS) in order to improve the QoS in terms of minimizing the total average latency ratio of MUs by considering the energy capacity limitation of the DBS. We formulate the DBS placement problem as an optimization problem and design a Latency aware dronE bAse station Placement (LEAP) algorithm to solve it efficiently. The performance of LEAP is demonstrated via simulations as compared to other two baseline methods.