Effects of Blockage in Deploying mmWave Drone Base Stations for 5G Networks and Beyond

Due to their unconstrained mobility and capability to carry goods or equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are considered as a part of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks and become attractive candidates to carry a base station (BS). As 5G requirements apply to a broad range of uses cases, it is of particular importance to satisfy those during spontaneous and temporary events, such as a marathon or a rural fair. To be able to support these scenarios, mobile operators need to deploy significant radio access resources quickly and on demand. Accordingly, by focusing on 5G cellular networks, we investigate the use of drone-assisted communication, where a drone is equipped with a millimeter-wave (mmWave) BS. Being a key technology for 5G, mmWave is able to facilitate the provisioning of the desired per-user data rates as drones arrive at the service area whenever needed. Therefore, in order to maximize the benefits of mmWave-drone-BS utilization, this paper proposes a methodology for its optimized deployment, which delivers the optimal height, coordinates, and coverage radius of the drone-BS by taking into account the human body blockage effects over a mmWave-specific channel model. Moreover, our methodology is able to maximize the number of offloaded users by satisfying the target signal quality at the cell edge and considering the maximum service capacity of the drone-BS. It was observed that the mmWave-specific features are extremely important to consider when targeting efficient drone-BS utilization and thus should be carefully incorporated into analysis.