Exploiting LTE-Advanced HetNets and FeICIC for UAV-Assisted Public Safety Communications

Abstract

Ensuring ubiquitous mission-critical public safety communications (PSC) to all the first responders in the public safety network (PSN) is crucial at an emergency site. Recently, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has received extensive interest for PSC to fill the coverage holes and establish reliable connectivity. The UAVs can be deployed as unmanned aerial base stations (UABSs) as part of a heterogeneous network (HetNet) PSC infrastructure. In this article, we design a PSC LTE-Advanced HetNet for different path loss models and deployment mechanism for UABSs. We enhance the system-wide spectral efficiency (SE) of this PSC HetNet by apply cell range expansion (CRE) to UABSs and mitigating the inter-cell interference arising in the HetNet by applying 3GPP Release-10 enhanced intercell interference coordination (eICIC) and 3GPP Release-11 further-enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (FeICIC). Through Monte-Carlo simulations, we compare the system-wide 5th percentile SE when UABSs are deployed on a hexagonal grid and when their locations are optimized using a genetic algorithm, while also jointly optimizing the CRE and the intercell interference coordination parameters. Our results show that at optimized UABS locations, reduced power subframes (FeICIC) defined in 3GPP Release-11 can provide considerably better 5th percentile SE than the 3GPP Release-10 with almost blank subframes (eICIC).

Downlink Analysis in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Assisted Cellular Networks With Clustered Users

“…UAVs are deployed to provide relief to the ground cellular BSs by offloading traffic from them around hotspots or large gatherings such as sporting events or concerts. They can also be deployed during emergencies or other instances during which ground BS resources are strained [15]. UEs are clustered around the projections of UAVs on the ground, and the union of cluster members' locations form a PCP, denoted by Φ C .…”

“…Same authors have analyzed the coverage and rate performance of a network consisting of a single UAV and underlaid device-to-device (D2D) users in [14]. In [15], performance of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and cell range expansion (CRE) methods are studied for a public safety communications (PSC) heterogeneous network consisting of UAVs. Employment of emergency flexible aerial nodes is studied for the communication recovery in situations such as natural disasters in [16].…”

Interference Coordination for Aerial and Terrestrial Nodes in Three-Tier LTE-Advanced HetNet

“…By following an approach similar to that of [4], we define the SIR and 5pSE experienced by an nth arbitrary UE for six different scenarios and are given in Table I. Therein, I agg is the aggregate interference at a UE from all the BSs, except from MOI, POI, and UOI, while N mue usf , N mue csf , N pue usf , N pue csf , N uue usf , and N uue csf are the number of MBS-UE, PBS-UE, and UABS-UE scheduled in USF/CSF.…”

“…Despite the earlier works given in [3], [4], to the best of our knowledge, there are no prior works that consider both AUEs and UABSs to simultaneously co-exist with terrestrial nodes such as the macro base-stations (MBSs), pico base-stations (PBSs), and ground user equipment (GUEs) in LTE-Advanced AG-HetNet. To this purpose, we simulate an AG-HetNet in public safety band class 14 as This research was supported in part by NSF under CNS-1453678.…”

Intelligent spectral efficiency and energy efficiency enhancement in LTE‐Advanced heterogeneous networks

“…In the work of Merwaday and Güvenç, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency are analyzed in two‐tier HetNet with reduced power subframes in a nonintelligent way to find out the optimum power level to maximize the energy spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. Interference mitigation and spectral efficiency enhancement is studied using feICIC for mission critical UAV‐assisted public safety communication HetNet in the work of Kumbhar et al Cell range expansion (CRE) is applied in it and jointly optimized the intercell interference coordination parameters using genetic algorithm. An exact potential game framework is proposed in the work of Liu et al for performing both eICIC and feICIC optimization in LTE‐A HetNets.…”