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Base Station Antenna Uptilt Optimization for Cellular-Connected Drone Corridors

Reliable wireless coverage in drone corridors is critical to enable a connected, safe, and secure airspace. To support beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations of aerial vehicles in a drone corridor, cellular base stations (BSs) can serve as a convenient infrastructure as they are widely deployed to provide seamless wireless coverage. However, antennas in the existing cellular networks are down-tilted to optimally serve their ground users, which results in coverage holes at higher altitudes when they are used to serve drones. In this paper, we consider the use of additional uptilted antennas at each cellular BS and optimize the uptilt angle to maximize the wireless coverage probability across a given drone corridor. Through numerical results, we can characterize the optimal value of the antenna uptilt angle for a given antenna pattern as well as the minimum/maximum altitudes of the drone corridor.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Advances in Secure 5G Network for a Nationwide Drone Corridor

Recent research has validated the proposal to add a separate set of antennas for 5G coverage in the air, while the conventional set of antennas continues to provide coverage on the ground, for a nationwide drone corridor for 5G cellular drones. More importantly, this drone corridor can be made secure and reliable by adapting the drone trajectories to avoid interference and security attacks, and with advanced precoding and physical layer security. Energy efficiency can also be improved with low-resolution massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems that utilize low resolution digital to analog converters. This paper describes additional research findings to further support the creation of this nationwide drone corridor. We design optimal drone trajectory within the drone corridor to improve safety for pedestrians and vehicles on the ground. We derive the optimum antenna uptilt angle to minimize outage probability for a given drone corridor. We also study the placement of intelligent reflector surfaces in an urban drone corridor in order to improve the multi-path scattering and hence the spatial multiplexing gains for serving drones. We calculate trajectories to maximize data rate in the presence of smart interference when drones are used as relays and each drone may be deployed in the paths of data flows from multiple BSs to multiple UEs. Next we demonstrate how the use of the additional set of antennas along with the 3GPP standard based subframe blanking method can minimize the interference from ground reflection of the radio frequency (RF) radiation from the downtilted antennas. The paper concludes with plans to continue with experimental studies to advance this work further.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗