Performance Analysis of 5G Cellular Networks Serving Terrestrial and Aerial Users in the Presence of Interference Coupling

Recent works on cellular systems that serve terrestrial and aerial user equipments (TUEs/AUEs) - such as crewed and uncrewed aerial vehicles – investigated the network performance in terms of achievable user throughput and system-wide spectral efficiency, especially under beamforming schemes that can target TUEs and AUEs individually. At the same time, several recent publications indicate that the inherent interference and load coupling between simultaneously served users has a large impact on the performance of multi-cell networks. However, none of the previous works analyze the performance of 5G cellular networks that serve a mixture of TUEs and AUEs in the presence of interference and load coupling. In this paper, we investigate the performance of such networks, and show that the impact of interference coupling heavily depends on the level of resource utilization in the system and can be effectively mitigated by proper use of multi-antenna technologies. Specifically, our numerical results indicate that while interference coupling between AUEs may be strong due to multiple line-of-sight links to neighbor base stations, its negative effect on system’s resource utilization and user throughput performance can be reduced by using directional antennas at the AUEs and AUE-specific uplink power control.