Reliable mobile communications is of critical importance, and should be maintained even in case of extremely crowded events or emergency scenarios. In such scenarios the deployment of drone-mounted base stations offers an agile and cost-efficient way to sustain coverage and/or provide capacity relief. In this paper we develop an analytical method to estimate the blocking and coverage probabilities of drone-assisted cellular networks using information that is readily available from network planning tools. We demonstrate how this method can be used to determine the minimum required number of drones and their corresponding locations for a given target performance level.@en

Drone base stations can help safeguard coverage and provide capacity relief when cellular networks are under stress. Examples of such stress scenarios are events with massive crowds or network outages. In this paper we focus on a disaster scenario with emergence of a traffic hotspot, where agile drone positioning and load management is a critical issue. In order to address this challenge, we propose and assess a data-driven algorithm which leverages real-time measurements to dynamically optimize the 3D position of the drone as well as a cell selection bias tuned for optimized load management. We compare the performance with three benchmark scenarios: i) no drone; ii) a drone positioned above the failing site; and iii) a drone with a statically optimized position and cell selection bias. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the call success rate and achieves close to optimal performance. @en

—Wireless communication networks provide a critical infrastructure, particularly in emergency situations due to disruptive events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. However, in these kinds of scenarios part of the network may no longer be operational and a traffic hotspot may emerge, which may result in coverage and/or capacity issues. Deploying self-steering drone-mounted base stations offers a potential method to quickly restore coverage and/or provide capacity relief in such situations, but appropriate positioning is crucial in order for a drone base station to be truly effective. Motivated by that challenge, we propose a data-driven algorithm to optimize the position of a drone base station in a scenario with a site failure and emergence of a traffic hotspot. We demonstrate that the use of a drone, when properly positioned, yields significant performance gains, and that our algorithm outperforms benchmark mechanisms in a wide range of scenarios. In addition, we show that our algorithm is able to find a near-optimal position for the drone in a reasonable amount of time, and even has the ability to track the optimal position in case of a moving hotspot.@en