Performance Analysis of Location-Based Base Station Cooperation for Cellular-Connected UAV Networks

This article studies the downlink performance analysis of a Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in a cellular-connected UAV network with a location-based base station (BS) cooperation strategy. In the network, a UAV in a non-cooperation area is provided its downlink by the closest ground BS (GBS) while a UAV in a cooperation area is provided its downlinks by the <italic>N</italic> closest GBSs. To more comprehensively measure the performance of BS cooperation, we use a refined metric, meta distribution, to reflect more fine-grained information on the transmission performance of a UAV in addition to traditional metrics, coverage probability and local delay. Correspondingly, we derive performance models for investigating the impacts of the BS cooperation level, UAV altitude, and GBS density on the coverage probability, meta distribution, and local delay of a UAV, taking account of the line-of-sight (LoS) probability of the downlink between a GBS and a UAV, and the small-scale fading of a channel following a Nakagami-m distribution. Simulation results show that the derived performance models are effective, and can be used to provide a theoretical reference for the design of a BS cooperation strategy for a cellular-connected UAV network.