The evaluation of FFR for interference management in coordinated hybrid terrestrial-aerial network

Abstract

Recent works have tried to incorporate unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations in conventional networks, however, the inter-cell interference mitigation techniques for such networks have not been studied comprehensively. In this paper, we consider a new heterogeneous cellular network, where terrestrial base stations (TBSs) and low altitude platforms (LAPs) collaborate to construct a hybrid network. We believe that it can serve as the stepping stone to a full-fledged coordinated multi-point implementation for 5G and beyond networks. The proposed network is simple, open to improvement and also makes use of available TBS. It promises to increase minimum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) value of users and also overall throughput by using fractional frequency reuse. The hovering LAP is used for edge users that have lower SIR than TBSs threshold. Furthermore, we simulated a few scenarios, analyzed the effect of radius and UAV altitude, found optimum values for both.