On-demand cellular coverage using drone-mounted base stations

This paper proposes a novel technique for on-demand cellular coverage in areas where traditional network infrastructure has been destroyed or is unavailable. Due to the unavailability of terrestrial communication networks, drone-mounted base stations (drone-BS) can be essential to establish temporary communications infrastructure by placing them at higher altitudes. Using such drone-BS to provide cellular coverage in disaster-stricken regions or regions where the network infrastructure is unavailable, we focus on the affected users and deploy drone-BSs accordingly based on the data rate requirements of the affected users. We propose an efficient algorithm that finds users in the affected region and determines the minimum number of drone-BSs required to provide coverage for all the identified users while satisfying their data-rate requirements. The algorithm is capable of restoring cellular coverage using backup drone-BSs and is also robust with respect to the real-time addition of new drone-BSs. The performance of our proposed algorithm demonstrates its potential and efficiency in determining the number of drone-BSs needed to provide cellular coverage to users based on the altitude and energy consumption of the drone-BS. In comparison with existing work, our proposed technique can reduce approximately 20% of the extra displacement of drone-BS during the user discovery process. Furthermore, it minimizes the number of drone-BSs required to cover all the affected users.