Design and analysis of aerial-terrestrial network: a joint solution for coverage and rate

Abstract

The exploitation of aerial base stations (A-BSs) in conjunction with terrestrial base stations (T-BSs) is envisioned as a promising solution to provide connectivity to devices and user-equipment (UE) in crowded situations (viz. in the sports event) and emergency situations (viz. in the disaster management). However, the use of A-BSs with existing terrestrial networks intensifies the inter-cell interference (ICI) to the devices and UEs, therefore leading to a degraded signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR). This paper addresses this issue by exploiting different radio access technology (RAT) (mmWave/microwave) for aerial and terrestrial networks. Indeed, the network connectivity is always a top priority for all applications. However, there are also some applications such as remote patient monitoring, and remote working, which requires both coverage and high data-rates. But, most of the existing research claims the trade-off between the coverage and the data-rate performance. Whereas this paper aims to improve coverage and rate simultaneously in an aerial-terrestrial networks by employing an optimal combination of mmWave and microwave RAT based on the proposed association strategy. The essential analysis of such an integrated network involves the evaluation of parameters based on the analytic model. Hence, this paper analytically obtains the coverage probability (CP) and average rate expressions for the proposed integrated aerial-terrestrial networks. The analysis is supported by probabilistic models-based simulations that agree closely with analytical results. The results claim that the proposed model leads to improved performance in terms of both CP and average rate. Also, the paper provides parametric analysis for CP and rate with A-BSs height and A-BSs density to enable its practical implementation in 5G/6G technologies.