Modelling and performance analysis of FFR-aided two layer aerial-terrestrial network

Abstract

Exploiting aerial base stations (A-BSs) in conjunction with terrestrial base stations (T-BSs) is an effective solution to provide uniform coverage everywhere, and anytime. However, the addition of A-BSs in an existing terrestrial network would intensify the inter-cell interference to user equipment, leads to a degraded signal-to-interference-ratio. There is a need to exploit inter-cell-interference-coordination (ICIC) scheme in such aerial-terrestrial network. Further, the aerial-terrestrial network requires a multi-layer environment to be modelled in many scenarios. In this study, the authors propose fractional frequency reuse (FFR) scheme as an ICIC scheme for two-layer aerial-terrestrial network. The analytical expression of coverage probability and average rate are derived for the proposed scheme, and compare it with the scheme, where no ICIC is considered in aerial-terrestrial network, and conventional scheme, where only T-BSs are considered. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the no ICIC scheme and conventional scheme. Simulation results are shown to support their analytical results.