Comparing capacity gains of static and UAV-based millimeter-wave relays in clustered deployments

Abstract

<p>The prospective millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks are envisioned to heavily utilize relay nodes to improve their performance in certain scenarios. In addition to the stationary mmWave relays already considered by 3GPP as one of the main focuses, the community recently started to explore the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based mmWave relays. These aerial nodes provide greater flexibility in terms of the relay placement in different environments as well as the ability to optimize the deployment height thus maximizing the cell performance. At the same time, the use of UAV-based relays leads to additional deployment complexity and expenditures for the network operators. In this paper, taking into account 3GPP-standardized mmWave-specific propagation, blockage, and resource allocation we compare the capacity gains brought by the static and the UAV-based mmWave relays in different scenarios. For each of the relay types, we investigate both uniform and clustered distribution of human users. The developed mathematical framework and a numerical study reveal that the highest capacity gains when utilizing the UAV-based relays instead of the static ones are observed in clustered deployments (up to 31%), while the performance difference between the UAV-based and the static mmWave relays under a uniform distribution of users is just 3%.</p>