With recent advancements in drone technology, researchers are now considering the possibility of deploying small cells served by base stations mounted on flying drones. A major advantage of such drone small cells is that the operators can quickly provide cellular services in areas of urgent demand without having to pre-install any infrastructure. Since the base station is attached to the drone, technically it is feasible for the base station to dynamic reposition itself in response to the changing locations of users for reducing the communication distance, decreasing the probability of signal blocking, and ultimately increasing the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we first propose distributed algorithms for autonomous control of drone movements, and then model and analyse the spectral efficiency performance of a drone small cell to shed new light on the fundamental benefits of dynamic repositioning. We show that, with dynamic repositioning, the spectral efficiency of drone small cells can be increased by nearly 100 for realistic drone speed, height, and user traffic model and without incurring any major increase in drone energy consumption.
The use of drone small cells (DSCs) which are aerial wireless base stations that can be mounted on flying devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is emerging as an effective technique for providing wireless services to ground users in a variety of scenarios. The efficient deployment of such DSCs while optimizing the covered area is one of the key design challenges. In this paper, considering the low altitude platform (LAP), the downlink coverage performance of DSCs is investigated. The optimal DSC altitude which leads to a maximum ground coverage and minimum required transmit power for a single DSC is derived. Furthermore, the problem of providing a maximum coverage for a certain geographical area using two DSCs is investigated in two scenarios; interference free and full interference between DSCs. The impact of the distance between DSCs on the coverage area is studied and the optimal distance between DSCs resulting in maximum coverage is derived. Numerical results verify our analytical results on the existence of optimal DSCs altitude separation distance and provide insights on the optimal deployment of DSCs to supplement wireless network coverage. Compensating temporary overload or site outage in cellular mobile networks is still an unsolved problem in order to avoid situations where services are unavailable. For this objective, we propose to use a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cellular technology to temporarily offload traffic into neighbouring cells in LTE 4G networks. We discuss relay placement, amount of relays and relay transmit power for overload and outage compensation and provide an analytical model for evaluating system performance in the downlink. We assume that the spatial separation between the aerial service provider, users, and offload eNodeB is beneficial for temporarily increasing spectral efficiency. Our results give evidence, that aerial network provisioning can be used for optimizing mobile networks in overload and outage scenarios.