AHSWN Home • Issue Contents • Forthcoming Papers

Optimal 3-D Placement of an Aerial Base Station in a Heterogeneous Wireless IoT with Nakagami-m Fading Channels
Ali Y. Al-Zahrani

This research studies the optimal positioning of an aerial base station (BS) for serving a wireless IoT that lacks fixed infrastructure. First, the BS horizontal location is determined by exploiting the fact that IoT devices are heterogeneous in their demand. Secondly, we study how the aerial BS vertical position determines the coverage area size, which is characterized by a target outage probability. For a general function (F) relating the elevation angle of the devices (with respect to the aerial BS) and the intensity of the multipath fading, the trade-off between the effects of the path loss and the multipath fading is investigated. The analytical results show that the optimal elevation angle of an edge device depends only on two environmental-dependent factors: F and the path loss exponent. Further, the optimal height under a target outage probability is derived in a closed form. Simulation results are presented to validate the mathematical analysis.

Keywords: Internet of things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), wireless channels, Nakagami fading, outage probability, digamma function, gamma function

Full Text (IP)