Agility and resilience requirements of future cellular networks may not befully satisfied by terrestrial base stations in cases of unexpected ortemporary events. A promising solution is assisting the cellular network vialow-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with base stations, i.e.,drone-cells. Although drone-cells provide a quick deployment opportunity asaerial base stations, efficient placement becomes one of the key issues. Inaddition to mobility of the drone-cells in the vertical dimension as well asthe horizontal dimension, the differences between the air-to-ground andterrestrial channels cause the placement of the drone-cells to diverge fromplacement of terrestrial base stations. In this paper, we first highlight theproperties of the dronecell placement problem, and formulate it as a 3-Dplacement problem with the objective of maximizing the revenue of the network.After some mathematical manipulations, we formulate an equivalentquadratically-constrained mixed integer non-linear optimization problem andpropose a computationally efficient numerical solution for this problem. Weverify our analytical derivations with numerical simulations and enrich themwith discussions which could serve as guidelines for researchers, mobilenetwork operators, and policy makers.
展开▼
