Towards intelligent flying base stations in future wireless network

Recent advancements in drone technology and base station miniaturization, together with an urgent need to reduce site rental costs, have created the unique opportunity to deploy cellular networks on a platform of mobile drones. This new development is redefining the wireless networks, as drone base stations can autonomously move in space to improve coverage and capacity of the network, tremendously enhancing the quality of service (QoS) for conventional cell-edge users. In this research, we first address the possibility of deploying drone base stations and focus on the practical limitations of drones to be used in cellular networks. Then, after validating the performance of drone base stations analytically, we design autonomous mobility control algorithms for drones to improve the spectral efficiency of the floating base stations. As the optimal mobility control is NP-hard, we propose a range of practically realizable heuristics with varying complexity and performance. Simulations show that the proposed heuristics can readily achieve significant improvement in terms of spectral efficiency, packet throughput, and transmission time. A surprising outcome is that even moving the drones at minimal speeds can achieve these gains, making it possible to avoid any negative effect on drone battery lifetime.