On the Tradeoffs between Coverage Radius, Altitude, and Beamwidth for Practical UAV Deployments

Abstract

Current studies on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based cellular deployment consider UAVs as aerial base stations for air-to-ground communication. However, they analyze UAV coverage radius and altitude interplay while omitting or over-simplifying an important aspect of UAV deployment, i.e., effect of a realistic antenna pattern. This paper addresses the UAV deployment problem while using a realistic three-dimensional directional antenna model. New tradeoffs between UAV design space dimensions are revealed and analyzed in different scenarios. The sensitivity of coverage area to both antenna beamwidth and height is compared. The analysis is extended to multiple UAVs and a new packing scheme is proposed for multiple UAVs coverage that offers several advantages compared to prior approaches.