Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for UAV-Aided Heterogeneous Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Model
The potential benefits of deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (ABSs) with sub-6GHz band and small cells terrestrial base stations (TBSs) with millimeter wave (mmWave) band in a hybrid heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is explored. A flexible non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based user association policy is proposed. By using the tools from stochastic geometry, new analytical expressions for association probability, coverage probability and spectrum efficiency are derived for characterizing the performance of UAV-aided HetNets under the realistic Air-to-Ground (A2G) and Ground-to-Ground (G2G) channels. Finally, we provide insights on the proposed hybrid HetNets by numerical results. We confirm that i) the proposed NOMA enabled HetNets is capable of achieving superior performance compared with the OMA enabled ABSs by setting power allocation factors and targeted signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold properly; ii) there is a tradeoff between the association probabilities and the spectrum efficiency in the NOMA enabled ABSs tier; iii) compared with sub-6GHz ABSs, mmWave enabled TBSs are capable of enhancing the spectrum efficiency when the mmwave line-of-sight (LoS) link is available.
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