Mobility in the Sky: Performance and Mobility Analysis for Cellular-Connected UAVs

Providing connectivity to unmanned aerial vehicle-user equipments such as drones or flying taxis is a major challenge for tomorrow cellular systems. In this paper, the use of coordinated multi-point transmission for providing seamless connectivity to UAV user equipments is investigated. In particular, a network of clustered ground base stations that cooperatively serve a number of UAVUEs is considered. Two scenarios are studied: scenarios with static, hovering UAV user equipments and scenarios with mobile UAV-UEs. Under a maximum ratio transmission, a novel framework is developed and leveraged to derive upper and lower bounds on the UAV-UE coverage probability for both scenarios. Using the derived results, the effects of various system parameters such as collaboration distance, UAVUE altitude, and UAV-UE velocity on the achievable performance are studied. Results reveal that, for both static and mobile UAV user equipments, when the BS antennas are tilted downwards, the coverage probability of a high-altitude UAV-UE is upper bounded by that of ground users regardless of the transmission scheme. Moreover, for low signal-to-interference-ratio thresholds, it is shown that CoMP transmission can improve the coverage probability of UAV user equipments, e.g., from 28% under the nearest association scheme to 60% for a collaboration distance of 200m.