Drone Empowered Small Cellular Disaster Recovery Networks for Resilient Smart Cities

Abstract

Abstract-Resilient communication networks, which can continue operations even after a calamity, will be a central feature of future smart cities. Recent proliferation of drones propelled by the availability of cheap commodity hardware presents a new avenue for provisioning such networks. In particular, with the advent of Google's Sky Bender and Facebook's internet drone, drone empowered small cellular networks (DSCNs) are no longer fantasy. DSCNs are attractive solution for public safety networks because of swift deployment capability and intrinsic network reconfigurability. While DSCNs have received some attention in the recent past, the design space of such networks has not been extensively traversed. In particular, co-existence of such networks with an operational ground cellular network in a post-disaster situation has not been investigated. Moreover, design parameters such as optimal altitude and number of drone base stations, etc., as a function of destroyed base stations, propagation conditions, etc., have not been explored. In order to address these design issues, we present a comprehensive statistical framework which is developed from stochastic geometric perspective. We then employ the developed framework to investigate the impact of several parametric variations on the performance of the DSCNs. Without loss of any generality, in this article, the performance metric employed is coverage probability of a down-link mobile user. It is demonstrated that by intelligently selecting the number of drones and their corresponding altitudes, ground users coverage can be significantly enhanced. This is attained without incurring significant performance penalty to the mobile users which continue to be served from operating ground infrastructure.

A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems

“…Note that, without any additional information about the exact locations, heights, and number of the obstacles, one must consider the randomness associated with the LoS and NLoS links. As a result, many of the existing literature on UAV communication (e.g., [8], [15], [37], [64], [90], [99], [113]- [117]) adopted the probabilistic path loss model given in [11], and [29]. As discussed in these works, the LoS and non-LoS (NLoS) links can be considered separately with different probabilities of occurrence.…”

“…In fact, as mentioned in Tables III and IV, the adjustable height of UAVs and their potential mobility provide additional degrees of freedom for an efficient deployment. As a result, optimal deployment of UAVs has received significant attention [7], [8], [11]- [13], [34], [35], [37], [113], [119], [120]. In fact, deployment is a key design consideration while using UAVs for coverage and capacity maximization, public safety, smart cities, caching, and IoT applications.…”

Spatial Configuration of Agile Wireless Networks With Drone-BSs and User-in-the-loop

“…Improving resilience of wireless networks is investigated in [12]- [15]. Downlink coverage analysis is conducted for a single drone-BS in [14], and for a 3D drone-BS network in [16]. Although studies discussed so far consider hovering drone-BSs, an energy efficient trajectory is determined for point-to-point communications between a fixed-altitude drone-BS and terrestrial users in [17], and for drone-BSs with a fixed coverage area and altitude in [18].…”

“…Environmental parameters depend on the average characteristics of urban areas, such as the density and average 3 The model is used in the following publications and many others: [? ], [8], [14], [18], [81], [82]. height of the buildings [80].…”

“…Γ(α) versus α for the environments in Table I. APPENDIX B REGIONAL ANALYSIS ON COVERAGE AND OPTIMAL INCENTIVE Coverage of a drone-BS is investigated in several studies, e.g., [14] and [80], however, UIL is not considered in any of the studies so far. As discussed in Section II-B, there is a probability that the user will move from D to R, which means that the previously uncovered users can be covered under certain circumstances.…”