Uplink coexistence for high throughput UAVs in cellular networks

We focus in this paper on Cellular-connected Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a scenario of a camera-equipped UAV, streaming a live event. The UAV coexists with a large number of ground User Equipment (gUEs) belonging to people attending the same event, and using the network to transmit their data. Hence the cellular network must satisfy the high data rate demand of both the UAV and gUEs. For that, we explore interference mitigation solutions, and propose a novel algorithm for UAV cell-selection which minimizes the impact of the UAV to the concerned serving cell. The results demonstrate an uplink data-rate gain of 32% for gUEs in the crowded cell, compared to the standard algorithm, while achieving a target UAV throughput of 20 Mbps. This comes at a cost of increased UAV transmission power of 50% and a slight data rate degradation for gUEs in neighboring cells, up to 13%.