Performance Analysis of mmWave drone-assisted 5G Hybrid Heterogeneous Network

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide us with the ability for rapid, on demand, and infrastructure-less deployment. This capability can be exploited to meet the rising demands of futuristic fifth generation (5G) and Internet of things (IoT) networks. In this study, we consider a downlink scenario in a multi-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) to meet the network quality-ofservice (QoS) requirements. The considered QoS metrics are network coverage and data rates. We evaluate our proposed network in two different scenarios. In the first scenario there is no terrestrial communication infrastructure, while in the second case UAVs assist the already existing communication infrastructure. We study impact of various network configurations, by varying number of UAVs in the HetNet, number of users, and bias factor for mmWave tier. Our results validate that UAVs can be deployed in a standalone role as well as coexist with terrestrial infrastructure. Through extensive simulations, we propose and implement methodology to configure the HetNet for an efficient coverage-rate trade off, while meeting desired QoS metrics at the same time.