Aerial Base Station Deployment in 6G Cellular Networks Using Tethered Drones: The Mobility and Endurance Tradeoff

Airborne base stations (BSs) (carried by drones) have a great potential to enhance the coverage and capacity of 6G cellular networks. However, one of the main challenges facing the deployment of airborne BSs is the limited available energy at the drone, which curtails the flight time. In fact, most current unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can only operate for a maximum of 1 h. The need to frequently visit the ground station (GS) to recharge limits the performance of the UAV-enabled cellular network and leaves the UAV?s coverage area temporarily out of service. In this article, we propose a UAV-enabled cellular network setup based on tethered UAVs (tUAVs). In the proposed setup, the tUAV is connected to a GS through a tether, which provides the tUAV with both energy and data. This enables a flight that can last for days. We describe in detail the components of the proposed system. Furthermore, we list the main advantages of a tUAV-enabled cellular network compared to typical untethered UAVs (uUAVs). Next, we discuss the potential applications and use cases for tUAVs. We also provide Monte Carlo simulations to compare the performance of tUAVs and uUAVs in terms of coverage probability. For instance, for a uUAV that is available 70% of the time (while unavailable because of charging or changing the battery 30% of the time), the simulation results show that tUAVs with a 120-m tether length can provide up to a 30% increase in coverage probability compared to uUAVs. Finally, we discuss the challenges, design considerations, and future research directions to realize the proposed setup.