Drone-Small-Cell-Assisted Resource Slicing for 5G Uplink Radio Access Networks
Hang Shen, Qiang Ye, Weihua Zhuang, Weisen Shi, Guangwei Bai, Geng Yang
Abstract
Radio resource slicing is critical to customize service provisioning in fifth-generation (5G) uplink radio access networks (RANs). Using drone-small-cells (DSCs) as aerial support for terrestrial base stations can enhance the flexibility for resource provisioning in response to traffic distribution variations. In this paper, we study a multi-DSC-assisted radio resource slicing problem for 5G uplink RANs, with the objective of minimizing the total uplink resource consumption under differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) constraints for both human-type and machine-type communication services. We begin with an interference-aware graph model to formulate the joint DSC three-dimension (3D) placement and device-DSC association problem for uplink radio resource slicing and prove that the proposed problem is NP-hard. A complexity-adjustable problem approximation is presented via screening candidate DSC deployment positions, which incorporates flight height adaptation to balance the uplink communication coverage and resource utilization. A lightweight approximation using a fixed DSC flight altitude is also provided with reduced complexity. For mathematical traceability, the DSC placement and device-DSC associations in each approximation are transformed as a special weight clique problem. An upgraded clique algorithm is then developed to determine how to deploy DSCs for a given number of DSCs. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed scheme's effectiveness in terms of resource utilization, network coverage, and drone dispatching cost.