Optimal Dimensioning and Performance Analysis of Drone-Based Wireless Communications

In this paper we present an optimal dimensioning for drone small cells. We extend the traditional models to include transmitter antenna gain patterns and wireless channel multi- path fading. We show that for the enhanced model there exists an optimal drone height which ensures the best performance in terms of various metrics. This analysis and optimization is achieved by averaging performance metrics over all mobile user locations inside the drone coverage area. Numerical and simulation results confirm this optimal drone height in terms of outage probability, bit-error rate and outage capacity.