UAV-Aided Post-Disaster Cellular Networks: A Novel Stochastic Geometry Approach

Abstract

Motivated by the need for ubiquitous and reliable communications in post-disaster emergency management systems (EMSs), we hereby present a novel and efficient stochastic geometry (SG) framework. This mathematical model is specifically designed to evaluate the quality of service (QoS) experienced by a typical ground user equipment (UE) residing either inside or outside a generic area affected by a calamity. In particular, we model the functioning terrestrial base stations (TBSs) as an inhomogeneous Poisson point process (IPPP), and assume that a given number of uniformly distributed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cellular transceivers is deployed in order to compensate for the damage suffered by some of the existing TBSs. The downlink (DL) coverage probability is then derived based on the maximum average received power association policy and the assumption of Nakagami-m fading conditions for all wireless links. The proposed numerical results show insightful trends in terms of coverage probability, depending on: distance of the UE from the disaster epicenter, disaster radius, quality of resilience (QoR) of the terrestrial network, and fleet of deployed ad-hoc aerial base stations (ABSs). The aim of this paper is therefore to prove the effectiveness of vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets) in emergency scenarios, which can both stimulate the involved authorities for their implementation and inspire researchers to further investigate related problems.

Reliability in Post-Disaster Networks: A Novel Interference-Mitigation Strategy

“…The main literature branch relates to the SG-based performance analysis of UAV-aided post-disaster cellular networks [7]- [9]. In particular, in [7] we used the binomial point process (BPP) and the inhomogeneous Poisson point process (IPPP) to model the post-disaster cellular network, and proposed a novel indicator-function-based SG approach for coverage analysis 1 ; then, we extracted useful insights about the coverage probability depending on the type and cardinality of the ad hoc UAV fleet, disaster radius, user's location, and terrestrial network's quality of resilience (QoR).…”

Tethered UAV Deployment Strategies: The Coverage and Energy Efficiency Trade-Off

“…Due to the recent incorporation of ABSs to alreadyexisting networks and motivated by its tractability, stochastic geometry has been widely used to analyze the performance of integrated aerial-terrestrial networks. For instance, [24] investigated the communication performance of UAVs deployed over IoT (Internet of Thing) devices that are modeled as binomial point process (BPP), while [25] investigated the coverage performance of UAV-assisted post-disaster wireless networks where ABSs are modeled as a uniform binomial point process (BPP) and TBSs are modeled as an inhomogeneous Poisson point process (IPPP).…”

Comparing Aerial-RIS- and Aerial-Base-Station-Aided Post-Disaster Cellular Networks

“…Another interesting topic is the use of UAV-mounted base stations (BSs) in post-disaster scenarios, which has been considered in relevant works such as [9]- [11]. In particular, authors in [9] suggested a fleet consisting of a tethered drone for high-capacity backhauling, an untethered drone for coverage, and an untethered powering drone to charge the former.…”

“…Finally, in [11], we have modeled the VHetNet resulting from the occurrence of a calamity by means of the binomial point process (BPP) and the inhomogeneous Poisson point process (IPPP), respectively for the aerial and terrestrial BS tiers; in this way, we could accurately evaluate the performance of the network depending on several parameters, such as the entity of the ad hoc aerial fleet, size of the disaster, and distance from the disaster epicenter.…”