Coverage and Rate Analysis of a UAV Enabled Heterogeneous Network

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a telecommunications base station enables rapid deployment of a wireless network in case of emergencies such as a disaster and at hotspots to offload the terrestrial base station. In this paper, we have modelled a wireless heterogeneous network with UAVs using stochastic geometry based on homogeneous Poisson point processes. This network uses UAV base stations (BS) in addition to the traditional terrestrial macro BS and small BS. We investigated two key network performance metrics, which are coverage probability and average rate per user for varying network parameters including path loss exponent, UAV altitude, density and bias. Through simulations we showed that the UAV enabled network gives good coverage probability of 0.99. We also showed that the coverage probability and the average rate per user reduce as UAV altitude and density increase due to lower signal strength and increasing interference respectively. The UAV bias on the other hand has negligible effect on both parameters.