Capacity Evaluation of Aerial LTE Base-Stations for Public Safety Communications

Abstract—Aerial-Terrestrial communication networks able to provide rapidly-deployable and resilient communications capable of offering broadband connectivity are emerging as a suitable solution for public safety scenarios. During natural disasters or unexpected events, terrestrial infrastructure can be seriously damaged or disrupted due to physical destruction of network components, disruption in subsystem interconnections and/or network congestion. In this context, Aerial-Terrestrial communi-cation networks are intended to provide temporal large coverage with the provision of broadband services at the disaster area. This paper studies the performance of Aerial UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) base stations in terms of coverage and capacity. Network model relies on appropriate channel model, LTE 3GPP specifications and well known schedulers are used. The results show the effect of the temperature, bandwidth, and scheduling discipline on the system capacity while at the same time coverage is investigated in different public safety scenarios. Index Terms—Aerial network infrastructure; emergency com-munications; low altitude platforms; Long Term Evolution (LTE); I