A 3D Tractable Model for UAV-Enabled Cellular Networks With Multiple Antennas

This paper aims to propose a three-dimensional (3D) point process that can be employed to generally deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a large-scale 3D cellular network and to tractably analyze the fundamental network-wide performances of the network. The proposed 3D point process is devised based on a 2D marked Poisson point process in which each point and its random mark uniquely correspond to the projection and the altitude of each point in the 3D point process, respectively. We study some of the important statistical properties of the proposed 3D point process and shed light on some crucial insights into them that facilitate the analyses of a UAV-enabled cellular network wherein all UAVs equipped with multiple antennas are deployed by the proposed 3D point process to serve as aerial base stations. The salient features of the proposed 3D point process lie in its suitability in practical 3D channel modeling and tractability in analysis. The downlink coverages of the UAV-enabled cellular network are found and their closed-form results for some special cases are also derived. Most importantly, their fundamental limits achieved by cell-free massive antenna array are characterized when coordinating all the UAVs to jointly perform non-coherent downlink transmission. These key findings and observations are numerically validated in this paper.