Coverage Area Performance for Multiple Interfering UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the capability of supplementing as well as improvising terrestrial cellular communications as aerial base stations to improve network coverage. This puts significance on the effective deployment of multiple UAVs while maximizing the coverage area in presence of co- channel interference generated by these UAVs. To this end, it is important to determine the parameters that affects the coverage area performance. In this paper, we investigate the effect of co-channel interference on the effective coverage of UAV-based small cells (USCs) deployed in a certain geographical area to satisfy a target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the cell edge. We propose a coordinated multi- UAV strategy to evaluate the trade-off between the UAV separation distance and the overall coverage area assuming symmetric placement of UAVs at a common optimal altitude to ensure minimum transmit power. Numerical results unveil that the number of UAVs and the separation distance between them should be carefully designed to achieve the optimal coverage area performance.