Downlink-Uplink Decoupled Access in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with UAVs

Abstract

The global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has grown substantially over the past decade and has become a high point for economic growth in many countries. Hence integrating UAVs with cellular networks is considered pivotal to tapping into new business opportunities for cellular operators, especially as the smartphone market is almost saturated. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for efficiently integrating UAVs within 5G cellular systems. To this end, we separate the UAV control and non-payload communication links (CNPC) from high-capacity data communication links-by decoupling the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) access-to allow user equipments (UEs) to connect to different base-stations (BSs) and transmit over different frequency bands in the UL and DL, such that the interference between ground UEs (GUEs) and UAVs is significantly reduced. The ground UE-BS links are also decoupled in a similar fashion to further minimize interference and maximize energy-efficiency. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and quantify the improvement in terms of the data rate of UAVs and GUEs in comparison to coupled benchmarks.