Hierarchical Availability in Flying Radio Access Networks as a Cournot Duopoly

Abstract

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations have attracted significant interest in telecommunications service field; Thanks to their low-cost, high maneuverability, flexible deployment and mobility advantages, they have become a main stream solution, to provide wireless communication in exceptional scenarios such as hard to reach areas or massive-attended events. Because UAVs are energy budget constrained, optimal availability control for energy efficiency is proposed in this paper. Within such a situation, the most important objective of a UAVs operator is to provide a service with acceptable availability and cost effective, so that, to realize a satisfactory benefit. The conducted study provides a non-cooperative duopoly game where UAVs Service Providers (SP) are competing to serve a geographical area. We focus on the scheduling of beaconing periods as an efficient mean of energy consumption optimization that results in temporary unavailability of network connectivity. A tractable comparative analysis for the game’s equilibrium, in terms of both Cournot and stackelberg frameworks is derived. We show that the benefit when adopting the leadership model is exhibiting some additional properties compared to the Cournot (anarchic) game. Some extensive simulations are given to confirm our proposal.