Dual Connectivity in Decoupled Aerial HetNets With Reverse Frequency Allocation and Clustered Jamming

The extensive increase in the number of mobile devices and their data-rate requirements will lead to the scarcity of network resources. One of the promising solutions to keep up with the capacity and coverage demands of the 5
^th
generation and beyond of cellular networks is to exploit the dual connectivity (DC) feature in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In this work, a two-tier aerial HetNet with decoupled access and reverse frequency allocation strategy is considered and the DC feature for the network edge users is investigated. The analytical expressions of the coverage probability for the first and second uplink (UL) connections in DC are derived. Our proposed setup improves the coverage performance of the DC with decoupled access in relation to single connectivity (SC) with and without decoupled access. The results show a relative increase in the DC-based coverage performance of 10.6% and 82.6%, for a signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) threshold of −20 dB, with respect to SC with and without decoupled access, respectively. Moreover, DC-based coverage in aerial HetNets is resilient to jamming interference. The results also show that if the wide-band jammers (WBJs) are present around a target-user equipment, the legitimate UL transmission is severely disrupted by the jamming interference. For instance, the percentage-decrease in the coverage performance of DC with decoupled access for the SIR threshold set to −20 dB is 4.9% and 10.6%, when the WBJs is set to 2 and 4, respectively. The coverage performance further decreases with an increase in the transmit powers of the WBJs and their number, whereas increases with an increase in the radius of the WBJs cluster.