Providing Wireless Coverage to High-rise Buildings Using UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as aerial wireless base stations when cellular networks go down. Prior studies on UAV-based wireless coverage typically consider an Air-to-Ground path loss model, which assumes that the users are outdoor and they are located on a 2D plane. In this paper, we propose using a single UAV to provide wireless coverage for indoor users inside a high-rise building under disaster situations (such as earthquakes or floods), when cellular networks are down. First, we present a realistic Outdoor-Indoor path loss model and describe the tradeoff introduced by this model. Then, we study the problem of efficient UAV placement, where the objective is to minimize the total transmit power required to cover the entire high-rise building. The formulated problem is non-convex and is generally difficult to solve. To that end, we consider two cases of practical interest and provide the efficient solutions to the formulated problem under these cases. In the first case, we aim to find the minimum transmit power such that an indoor user with the maximum path loss can be covered. In the second case, we assume that the locations of indoor users are symmetric across the dimensions of each floor.