Towards Mitigating the Impact of UAVs on Cellular Communications

The next generation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will rely on mobile networks as a communication infrastructure. Several issues need to be addressed to enable the expected potentials from this communication. In particular, it was demonstrated that flying UAVs perceive a high number of base stations (BSs), consequently causing more interferences on non-serving BSs. This unfortunately results in decreased throughput for ground user equipments (UEs) already connected. Such a problem could be a limiting factor for mobile network-enabled UAVs, due to its consequences on the quality of experience (QoE) of served UEs. This underpins the focus of this article, wherein the effect of UAVs' communication on ground UEs in the uplink scenario is studied. First, given the fact that the nature of flying UAVs introduces particularities that make the underlying communication models different from traditional ones, this work proposes a model for mobile network-enabled UAVs (considering interferences, path loss, and fast fading). Moreover, we also tackle the QoE issue and propose an optimization solution based on adjusting the transmission power of UAVs. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the mobile network performance in the presence of flying UAVs. Our results reveal that as the number of added UAVs increases, a significant increase in the outage is observed. We demonstrate that our power optimization strategy guarantees the QoE for UEs, offers good communication links for UAVs, and reduces the overall interference in the network.