Optimal Placement of Aerial Base Station Utilizing Topographic Features

In aerial base station (ABS) placement studies, leveraging information on topographic features for air-to-ground (A2G) channel analysis has been considered a promising approach. Recently, this approach has been studied in several works. However, these studies have predominantly focused on simplistic 3-D cuboid representations of topographic features, which do not adequately capture the complexity of real-world environments, thereby impeding accurate A2G channel analysis. In this article, we propose a more advanced strategy by generalizing the shapes and arrangements of topographic features to enable their realistic and accurate representations. Utilizing these generalized topographic models, we study the problem of finding the ABS location for coverage maximization. To solve this problem, we identify so-called line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS (NLoS) zones formed by these generalized topographic features through geometric analysis and obtain straightforward derivations of the coverage area for any given ABS location. Building upon this foundation, we develop a new ABS placement strategy, termed the polygonal feature-aware ABS placement algorithm (FA-poly). Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FA-poly significantly outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of the coverage area, as it accurately identifies channel conditions by leveraging information on generalized topographic features and obtains the coverage area based on them.