In recent years, the use of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to boost mobile networking technology performance is rising interest in the scientific community. UAVs can be used as aerial relays to be deployed in 4G/LTE networks and small scale UAVs, such as quadrotors or small fixed wing drones, are able to carry a wide variety of sensors, actuators and communication equipments. Due to the increasing interest in this field, UAVs are becoming more and more affordable and even off-the-shelf quadrotor UAVs can carry payloads of few kilograms. In parallel, the miniaturization of commercial femto cells results in the development of very lightweight network equipment. The combination of UAVs and cellular network equipment provides an interesting approach towards the enhancement of performance of a network. Most of the applications of UAVs are thought as relay deployment in order to compensate for temporary cell overload or cell outage in cellular networks. In this project, by merging the multidisciplinary knowledge of participants, we will study and propose approaches for boosting cellular network performance through the use of UAVs as Drone-Base Stations (Drone-BS). We will look both at an optimization of the Drone-BS deployment for an optimal coverage given their communication capabilities as well as their optimal mission planning having as constraints the UAV characteristics (e.g. battery lifetime, maximum achievable speed, coverage etc) and environmental conditions.
