Cooperative UAV Cluster-Assisted Terrestrial Cellular Networks for Ubiquitous Coverage

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), featured by flexible configuration, robust deployment, and line-of-sight links, has a great potential to provide ubiquitous wireless coverage and high-speed transmission. In this paper, we aim to analyze the coverage performance of UAV-assisted terrestrial cellular networks, where partially energy-harvesting-powered caching UAVs are randomly deployed in the 3-D space with a minimum and maximum altitude, i.e., H-l and H-h. A novel cooperative UAV clustering scheme is proposed to offload ground mobile terminals (GMTs) from ground cellular base stations to cooperative UAV clusters. A cooperative UAV cluster is developed within a cylinder with projection centered on a GMT, based on their energy states, the cached contents, and the cell loads. With tractable Poisson point process and Gamma approximation, explicit expressions for the successful transmission probabilities are obtained. A theoretical analysis reveals that the cooperative probability of a UAV and the offloading probability of a GMT have bell-shaped relation with respect to the radius of the cylinder and the cache hit probability (the matching probability of a content request and content cache). Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the impacts of the system parameters on the cooperative UAV cluster. The results also give the optimal average altitude (H-l + H-h/2) and altitude difference (H-h - H-l) in maximizing the coverage performance with the proposed cooperative transmission scheme.