Analysis of Handover Rate and Coverage Performance of Mobile Users in UAV Networks

We study the handover (HO) rate and user performance in a large-scale three-dimensional (3-D) unmanned-aerial vehicle (UAV) network, where the UAVs are deployed to provide access to the ground mobile users in a disaster scenario. The 3-D network is modeled as a two-dimensional (2-D) homogeneous marked poisson point process (PPP), in which the marks represent the altitude of the UAVs. Due to the different altitudes marked for the UAVs, irregularly shaped Voronoi cells are formed, which is challenging to analyze. Leveraging the HO rate, we derive the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) coverage probability and the average throughput experienced by mobile users. Based on the derived framework, we investigate the impact of the intensity of deployment and user speeds on the HO rate and throughput, which enables us to present several key system-design insights for such networks.