Title: Dynamic Base Station Repositioning to Improve Spectral Efficiency of Drone Small Cells,
Abstract: With recent advancements in drone technology, researchers are now considering
the possibility of deploying small cells served by base stations mounted on
flying drones. A major advantage of such drone small cells is that the
operators can quickly provide cellular services in areas of urgent demand
without having to pre-install any infrastructure. Since the base station is
attached to the drone, technically it is feasible for the base station to
dynamic reposition itself in response to the changing locations of users for
reducing the communication distance, decreasing the probability of signal
blocking, and ultimately increasing the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we
first propose distributed algorithms for autonomous control of drone movements,
and then model and analyse the spectral efficiency performance of a drone small
cell to shed new light on the fundamental benefits of dynamic repositioning. We
show that, with dynamic repositioning, the spectral efficiency of drone small
cells can be increased by nearly 100\% for realistic drone speed, height, and
user traffic model and without incurring any major increase in drone energy
consumption.