An Aerial and Ground Base Station Cooperation Strategy for UAV and Cellular Integrated Networks

This article proposes an aerial and ground base station cooperation (AG_CoMP) strategy for improving the downlink transmission performance of an aerial UAV user (AUE) in an unmanned aerial vehicle and cellular integrated network. The AG_CoMP strategy allows both a ground base station (GBS) and an aerial base station (ABS) to participate in BS cooperation, and seeks to reduce the negative impact of BS cooperation on the overall network performance. The GBS and ABS closest to an AUE are associated to cooperatively provide downlink transmission of the AUE and a blanking area is defined to disallow nearby GBSs to transmit during the transmission of the AUE. A combination of noncoherent joint transmission and dynamic point blanking is used to reduce the large signaling overhead for transmission of the AUE’s data between the cooperative BSs with the proposed strategy. Performance models are derived to analyze the downlink transmission performance of an AUE in terms of the coverage probability, achievable throughput, and SINR meta distribution of the AUE. Numerical results show that compared with three benchmark strategies, the proposed AG_CoMP strategy can ensure a relatively good downlink transmission performance, and achieve a better downlink transmission performance when an AUE is at an intermediate altitude between an ABS and a GBS.