Ricerc@Sapienza

Abstract—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. 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
have become more and more affordable and even off-the-shelf
quadrotor UAVs can carry >1 kg equipments in their structure.
In parallel, the miniaturization of commercial femto cells results
in the development of very lightweight network equipments. The
combination of UAVs and cellular network equipments provides
an interesting approach towards the enhancement of performance
of a network. In our view, UAVs are seen as an additional service
that can be provided in order to ensure a higher Quality of
Experience for video streaming users. The work focuses on the
study of a system model with specific parameters and constraints
in order to embed a UAV functioning as an LTE micro-cell
to perform user offloading and optimize the bandwidth usage
of a macrocell during video streaming. The result is a new
architecture, that can be framed as Heterogeneous Network.