Performance Enhancement for Cell-Edge Users via UAVs in Cellular Networks

Abstract

In cellular networks, the performance of cell-edge users is notably deficient, especially for those receiving almost comparable signal strengths from the serving base station (BS) and interfering BS(s). To improve their performance, a cell-edge UAV deployment scheme is proposed, where the UAVs are deployed to hover over these cell-edge users to serve them. Specifically, the locations of BSs are modeled using a Poisson point process (PPP) and the Voronoi cells are formed. We consider two distinct types of cell-edge users positioned at the Voronoi vertices and boundaries, corresponding to the worst-case and boundary users, respectively. Due to the intractable spatial distribution of the interfering UAVs, we utilize the PPP and binomial point process (BPP) approximations to characterize their interference. Subsequently, we derive the success probabilities for these two types of cell-edge users. The results show the similar effectiveness of the two approximate models for the locations of the UAVs. Furthermore, we obtain the asymptotic success probabilities to analyze the performance in high-reliability regimes and propose an effective approximation based on the asymptotic behavior to simplify the analytical expressions. The results highlight the substantial performance enhancement through the proposed UAV deployment scheme for cell-edge users.