Enabling 5G Communication Systems to Support Vertical Industries

9 Towards Realistic Modelling of Drone‐based Cellular Network Coverage

Haneya Naeem Qureshi and Ali Imran

The demand for more diverse, flexible, accessible and resilient broadband service with higher capacity and coverage is on the rise. Some of these requirements can be accomplished with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as aerial base stations. This is because of the several advantages UAV‐based communication offers, such as higher likelihood of line‐of‐sight (LoS) path and less scatter and signal absorption as compared to terrestrial systems [1,2]. Moreover, the demand for increase in capacity is leading towards deployment of small cells in terrestrial networks, resulting in the need for higher cell counts, leading to far larger number of ground sites. This makes the goal of attaining seamless coverage over a wide geographical area through terrestrial systems unfeasible due to limited availability of suitable sites and local regulations. This challenge is likely to aggravate with advent of even smaller mmWave cells offering even more sporadic coverage [3].

Similarly, satellite networks have their own limitations such as high latency, high propagation loss, limited orbit space and high launching costs. On the contrary, UAVs can be deployed quickly with much more flexibility to move from one point to another, which is a desirable feature for rapid, on‐demand or emergency communications [4].

UAVs can thus be seen as potential enablers to meet the several challenges ...