On the Influence of Charging Stations Spatial Distribution and Capacity on UAV-enabled Networks

Abstract

Using drones for cellular coverage enhancement is a recent technology that has shown a great potential in various practical scenarios. However, one of the main challenges that limits the performance of drone-enabled wireless networks is the limited flight time. In particular, due to the limited on-board battery size, the drone needs to frequently interrupt its operation and fly back to a charging station to recharge/replace its battery. In addition, the charging station might be responsible to recharge multiple drones. Given that the charging station has limited capacity, it can only serve a finite number of drones simultaneously. Hence, in order to accurately capture the influence of the battery limitation on the performance, it is required to analyze the dynamics of the time spent by the drones at the charging stations. In this thesis, we first use tools from queuing theory and stochastic geometry to study the influence of each of the charging stations limited capacity and spatial density on the performance of a drone-enabled wireless network. We then extend our work to rural areas where users are greatly impacted by low income, high cost of backhaul connectivity, and limited resources. Considering the limitation of the electricity supply scarcity in some rural regions, we investigate the possibility and performance enhancement of the deployment of renewable energy (RE) charging stations. We outline three practical scenarios, and use simulation results to demonstrate that RE charging stations can be a possible solution to address the limited on-board battery of UAVs in rural areas, specially when they can harvest and store enough energy.