Air-Ground Cooperation for Cell-Corner Users

To address the poor performance experienced by cell-corner users located equidistantly to the serving base station (BS) and the nearest interfering BSs, this paper proposes a flexible and general air-ground cooperation scheme based on unmanned aerial vehicles and dynamic BS coordination in the form of BS silencing (BSS) or joint transmission (JT). To show the role of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the cooperation, we define the UAV-to-BS power ratio (UBPR) as a critical parameter to measure whether introducing the UAV can improve the user’s performance. Using stochastic geometry tools, we derive the success probability of the user located at the corner of the Voronoi diagram, called the worst-case user, in Poisson cellular networks. To facilitate the comparison between different modes of cooperation, we further analyze the cooperation gain including the diversity and power gains through the asymptotic outage probability in the high-reliability regime. Furthermore, to reflect the impact of the cooperation scheme on the overall network performance, we analyze the normalized spectral efficiency, which, unlike those adopted in existing works, accounts for the costs of both resource occupancy and data exchange. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analytical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for cell-corner users.