Integrating Drones and Wireless Power Transfer into Beyond 5G Networks

Abstract

As fifth generation (5G) standards have been established and 5G commercial products are just around the corner, both academia and industry have started to look at requirements for beyond 5G networks. Network flexibility and long battery life are among the key requirements for beyond 5G wireless communication systems. These critical requirements, which have not been sufficiently addressed in the previous generations, are the focus of this thesis.

The first half of this thesis explores two important use cases of drones to provide flexible communication networks. First, the performance of a cellular network with underlay drone cell for temporary events inside a stadium is studied. Using stochastic geometry, a general analytical framework is proposed to analyze the uplink and the downlink coverage probabilities for both the aerial and the terrestrial systems. Our results show that for urban environment and dense urban environment, the drone is best deployed at a low height (e.g., 200 m or lower), regardless of the distance between the center of the stadium and the terrestrial base station. However, for suburban environment and high-rise urban environment, the best drone altitude varies. Second, the performance of emergency information dissemination in public safety scenarios using drone is studied. A drone-assisted multihop multicast device-to-device (D2D) network is considered, where an emergency alert message broadcasted by a drone at the first time slot is multicasted by the D2D users that have successfully received the message through multihop. The impact of different system parameters on the link and the network performance is investigated. Our results demonstrate that a higher drone altitude provides better link and network coverage probabilities and lower mean local delay. Under practical setups, the cell edge user located 2 km from the ground projection of the drone has a link coverage probability around 90% after 5 time slots and a mean local delay of 2.32 time slots with a drone height as low as 200 m.

The second half of this thesis investigates wireless power transfer networks. Specifically, the use of power beacons in a millimeter wave wireless ad hoc network is considered, where transmitters adopt the harvest-then-transmit protocol. First, the characteristic of the aggregate received power from power beacons is analyzed and the lognormal distribution is found to provide the best complementary cumulative distribution function approximation compared to other distributions considered in the literature. Then, a tractable model with discrete transmit power for each transmitter is proposed to compute the channel coverage probability and the total coverage probability. Our results show that our model provides a good accuracy and reveal the impact of different system parameters on the total coverage probability. Our results also illustrate that under practical setups, for power beacon transmit power of 50 dBm and transmitters with maximum transmit power between 20 - 40 dBm, which are safe for human exposure, the total coverage probability is around 90%. Thus, it is feasible and safe to power transmitters in a millimeter wave ad hoc network using power beacons.