Heuristic Approach for Jointly Optimizing FeICIC and UAV Locations in Multi-Tier LTE-Advanced Public Safety HetNet
This work addresses connectivity challenges in public safety networks by incrementally improving UAV deployment and interference coordination in LTE-Advanced systems.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating UAVs as both user equipment and base stations into LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks to enhance wireless connectivity, finding that heuristic algorithms like GA and eHSGA outperform brute-force techniques in optimizing UAV locations, achieving better peak coverage probability and fifth percentile spectral efficiency, with three-tier FeICIC providing considerably better performance than eICIC.
UAV enabled communications and networking can enhance wireless connectivity and support emerging services. However, this would require system-level understanding to modify and extend the existing terrestrial network infrastructure. In this paper, we integrate UAVs both as user equipment and base stations into existing LTE-Advanced heterogeneous network (HetNet) and provide system-level insights of this three-tier LTE-Advanced air-ground HetNet (AG-HetNet). This AG-HetNet leverages cell range expansion (CRE), ICIC, 3D beamforming, and enhanced support for UAVs. Using system-level understanding and through brute-force technique and heuristics algorithms, we evaluate the performance of AG-HetNet in terms of fifth percentile spectral efficiency (5pSE) and coverage probability. We compare 5pSE and coverage probability, when aerial base-stations (UABS) are deployed on a fixed hexagonal grid and when their locations are optimized using genetic algorithm (GA) and elitist harmony search algorithm based on genetic algorithm (eHSGA). Our simulation results show the heuristic algorithms outperform the brute-force technique and achieve better peak values of coverage probability and 5pSE. Simulation results also show that trade-off exists between peak values and computation time when using heuristic algorithms. Furthermore, the three-tier hierarchical structuring of FeICIC provides considerably better 5pSE and coverage probability than eICIC.