Performance Analysis of RF/VLC Enabled UAV Base Station in Heterogeneous Network

In this paper, we study the trade-offs between two network configurations employed in a heterogeneous network setup wherein unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations (UBS) coexist with a macro base station (MBS). Specifically, two network configurations are investigated: (i) Heterogeneous network with MBS and UAV-Cellular base station (UAV-CBS) and (ii) Heterogeneous network with MBS and visible light communication (VLC) enabled UAV-Optical base station (UAV-OBS). A framework has been developed to compare the average spectral efficiency of the proposed network configurations. In the developed framework, the average spectral efficiency has been analyzed by taking into account the user’s association and user’s quality of service (QoS) requirement and location. To gain more concrete insights, we compare the above configurations for (i) one UBS and one MBS network, and (ii) two UBSs and one MBS network. We infer, from the simulation results, that as the number of UBSs in use increases, the network with VLC enabled UAV-OBS outperforms the cellular-enabled UAV-CBS.