Placement of mmWave Base Stations for Serving Urban Drone Corridors

As the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various commercial, civil, and military applications increases, it becomes important to study the design of aerial drone corridors that can support multiple simultaneous UAV missions. In this work, we study the placement of base stations (BSs) to serve aerial drone corridors while satisfying specific UAV mission requirements, such as the geometrical waypoints for the UAV to fly through and the minimum data rate to be supported along the mission trajectory. We develop a mathematical model of the drone corridor and propose a brute force algorithm that leverages A∗ search to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the corridor by choosing the minimal set of BS locations from a pre-determined initial set. Using raytracing simulations, BS placement results are presented for various antenna array sizes in a dense urban region in East Manhattan. It was found that, for the scenario under consideration, a single BS equipped with an 8x8 antenna array is sufficient to satisfy the given QoS requirements of the corridor, while two BSs are required when using 4x4 antenna arrays.