Aerial Base Station Assisted Cellular Communication: Performance and Trade-Off

The use of Aerial Base Stations (ABSs) has received a great deal of attention in academia and industry as a means to support the cellular communication traffic growth. In this article, we focus on obtaining the optimal altitude of an ABS using two criteria - maximum cell coverage area and minimum Symbol Error Rate (SER). Our study is done by using a probabilistic air-to-ground channel model, developed for low altitude aerial platforms via simulations on a commercial ray tracing software, for different scenarios like Urban High Rise, Urban, and Suburban. The probability distributions of the received power of the ground users and of the power delay profile at optimal ABS altitude are provided as a function of the size of the cell area. For the SER analysis, we present a system model based on Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM), in a time-frequency grid that is compatible with Long Term Evolution, by implementing parameters for low latency communication at the physical layer. The impact of “Better than Nyquist” pulses on the GFDM system is evaluated in terms of SER performance. From the presented results, a significant improvement is demonstrated compared to the traditional Nyquist pulses.