UAV Aided Data Dissemination for Multi-hop Backhauling in RAN

Emerging applications in the radio access network (RAN), such as proactive caching and the massive machine type communications, will generate traffic with a Large Volume of data but can tolerate long Transmission Delay (LVTD). Together with a rapid growth of overall traffic demand, traffic with LVTD features brings lots of challenges to the backhaul in RANs. In this paper, we study how to schedule traffic in multi-hop backhaul networks with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), In the proposed system, the UAVs are employed to establish broadband connections with the ground terminals through free-space optical links and serve as data collectors between terrestrial access points so as to alleviate the communication burden on the terrestrial network. Through numerical simulations, it is demonstrated that the novel network scheduling scheme combined with dynamic UAV path planning can provide significant performance gain.