Drone-Assisted Cellular Networks: Optimal Positioning and Load Management

The use of drone base stations offers an agile mechanism to safeguard coverage and provide capacity relief when cellular networks are under stress. Such stress conditions can occur for example in case of special events with massive crowds or network outages. In this paper we focus on a disaster scenario with emergence of a hotspot, and analyze the impact of the drone position (altitude, horizontal position) and selection bias on the network performance. We determine the optimal settings of these control parameters as a function of the hotspot location, and demonstrate that the optimized values can drastically reduce the fraction of failed calls.