Increasing the Cellular Network Capacity Using Self-Organized Aerial Base Stations

Abstract

Nowadays, the cellular network planning becomes a complex task due to unpredictable changes in mobile user behavior and high capacity requirements. Therefore, it is needed to deploy a high number of base stations in order to provide a requested quality of service. The advancement in technologies gives us an opportunity to use aerial base stations, which can change their positions in order to provide capacity only in space and time where and when it is needed. In this work, we present a novel self-organized approach based on gradient search and potential fields for aerial base station deployment in order to increase the cellular network capacity. In contrast to the current aerial base station deployment approaches, our solution satisfies all requirements of modern urban scenario -- it uses only local information, adapts to different environments, provides high degree of autonomy and scalability and operates in real time. We provide a simulation-based evaluation of the proposed approach and a comparison to traditional base station placement in terms of the average aggregated system capacity. Results indicate that capacity can be improved by up to 52% in case of dense user clusters. Therefore network deployment costs can be minimized and spectrum efficiency maximized.