Effects of 3D Antenna Radiation and Two-Hop Relaying on Optimal UAV Trajectory in Cellular Networks

In this paper, considering an interference limited in-band downlink cellular network, we study the effects of scheduling criteria, mobility constraints, path loss models, backhaul constraints, and 3D antenna radiation pattern on trajectory optimization problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In particular, we consider a UAV that is tasked to travel between two locations within a given amount of time (e.g., for delivery or surveillance purposes), and we consider that such a UAV can be used to improve cellular connectivity of mobile users by serving as a relay for the terrestrial network. As the optimization problem is hard to solve numerically, we explore the dynamic programming (DP) technique for finding the optimum UAV trajectory. We utilize capacity and coverage performance of the terrestrial network while studying all the effects of different techniques and phenomenon. Extensive simulations show that the maximum sum-rate trajectory provides the best per user capacity whereas, the optimal proportional fair (PF) rate trajectory provides higher coverage probability than the other two. Since, the generated trajectories are infeasible for the UAV to follow exactly as it can not take sharp turns due to kinematic constraints, we generate smooth trajectory using Bezier curves. Our results show that the cellular capacity using the Bezier curves is close to the capacity observed when using the optimal trajectories.