Large-Scale Cellular Coverage Analyses For Uav Data Relay Via Channel Modeling

With the rapid popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as drones), UAV data relay has demonstrated potential extending wireless communication coverage, especially for rural areas. The flexibility of this approach has attracted research attention from a variety of areas, including Internet of Things, intelligent transportation systems, and digital agriculture. However, most current research effort focuses on modeling and theoretically optimizing data relay systems via UAV trajectories in simplified geographic environments, while taking advantage of UAVs for practical wireless communication networks requires large-scale quantitative performance analysis results based on real-life environment information. In this paper, we propose algorithms for generating large-scale blockage and path loss maps via terrain-based channel modeling for cellular communication systems with fixed-height relay drones. Our analyses reveal the coverage ratios for Tippecanoe County and the Wabash Heartland Innovation Network region in Indiana, with relay drones simulated at different heights. A coverage ratio gain over 40% can be achieved at a drone height of 100 m, compared to a typical pedestrian height of 1.5 m. These sitespecific analyses are important in locating poorly covered spots and quantifying the coverage improvement from UAV data relay.