Fair Cellular Throughput Optimization with the Aid of Coordinated Drones

Abstract

The interest on flexible air-to-ground channels from aerial base stations to enhance users access by seeking good line-of-sight connectivity from the air has increased in the past years. In this paper, we propose a deployable analytical framework for the 3-D placement of a fleet of coordinated drone relay stations to optimize network capacity according to α-fairness metrics. We formulate a mixed-integer non-convex program, which results to be intractable. Therefore, we design a near-optimal heuristic that can solve the problem in real-time applications. We assess the performance of our proposal by simulation, using a realistic urban topology, and study pros and cons of using drone relay stations in both static and dynamic scenarios, when popular events gather masses of users in limited areas.