Skip to main content

Coverage and Power Gain of Aerial Versus Terrestrial Base Stations

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Ubiquitous Networking 2 (UNet 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 397))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Aerial stations have been recently recognized as an attractive alternative to provide wireless services to terrestrial users thanks to their superior coverage capability. In this paper, the coverage and power gain that can be achieved by a drone with respect to a terrestrial base station are studied. We address the problem by characterizing the coverage area based on the network outage probability, taking into account the height depending fading and path loss exponent that characterize air-to-ground wireless links. Results show that there exist a unique optimal altitude that provides the largest coverage and power gain, which strikes a fine balance between the path loss, due to the higher altitude, and a reduced influence of the multipath scattering. While numerical evaluations show that even at low altitudes the network gains up to 4x coverage or 20 dB power, the gain achieved at optimal altitude can be higher

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Facebook: Connecting the World from the Sky. Facebook, Technical report (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Katikala, S.: Google project loon. InSight: Rivier Acad. J. 10(2) (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  3. ABSOLUTE (Aerial Base Stations with Opportunistic Links for Unexpected and Temporary Events). http://www.absolute-project.eu

  4. Wu, C., Cao, X., Lin, R., Wang, F.: Registration-based moving vehicle detection for low-altitude urban traffic surveillance. In: 8th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA), pp. 373–378. IEEE (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Berni, J.A., Zarco-Tejada, P.J., Suarez, L., Fereres, E.: Thermal and narrowband multispectral remote sensing for vegetation monitoring from an unmanned aerial vehicle. J. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 47(3), 722–738 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Qiantori, A., Sutiono, A.B., Hariyanto, H., Suwa, H., Ohta, T.: An emergency medical communications system by low altitude platform at the early stages of a natural disaster in indonesia. J. Med. Syst. 36(1), 41–52 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Guo, W., Devine, C., Wang, S.: Performance analysis of micro unmanned airborne communication relays for cellular networks. In: 9th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP), pp. 658–663. IEEE Press (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Rohde, S., Wietfeld, C.: Interference aware positioning of aerial relays for cell overload and outage compensation. In: Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Fall), pp. 1–5. IEEE Press (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Kosmerl, J., Vilhar, A.: Base stations placement optimization in wireless networks for emergency communications. In: IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC), pp. 200–205 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Mozaffari, M., Saad, W., Bennis, M., Debbah, M.: Drone small cells in the clouds: design, deployment and performance analysis (2015). arXiv:1509.01655

  11. Al-Hourani, A., Kandeepan, S., Lardner, S.: Optimal LAP altitude for maximum coverage. J. IEEE Wirel. Commun. Lett. 3(6), 569–572 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Kandeepan, S., Gomez, K., Reynaud, L., Rasheed, T.: Aerialterrestrial communications: terrestrial cooperation and energy-efficient transmissions to aerial base stations. J. IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst. 50(4), 2715–2735 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Matolak, D.W.: Air-ground channels & models: comprehensive review and considerations for unmanned aircraft systems. In: IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 1–17 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Shimamoto, S., et al.: Channel characterization and performance evaluation of mobile communication employing stratospheric platforms. J. IEICE Trans. Commun. 89(3), 937–944 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mohammad Mahdi Azari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

About this paper

Cite this paper

Azari, M.M., Rosas, F., Chiumento, A., Chen, KC., Pollin, S. (2017). Coverage and Power Gain of Aerial Versus Terrestrial Base Stations. In: El-Azouzi, R., Menasche, D.S., Sabir, E., De Pellegrini, F., Benjillali, M. (eds) Advances in Ubiquitous Networking 2. UNet 2016. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 397. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1627-1_49

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1627-1_49

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-1626-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-1627-1

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics