Improved Throughput Coverage in Natural Disasters: Unmanned Aerial Base Stations for Public-Safety Communications

Communications play an important role during public-safety operations. Because the current communication technologies heavily rely on the backbone network, the failure of base stations (BSs) due to natural disasters or malevolent attacks causes communication difficulties for public-safety and emergency communications. Recently, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as quadcopters and gliders, has gained attention in publicsafety communications (PSCs). They can be operated as unmanned aerial BSs (UABSs), which can be deployed rapidly as a part of the heterogeneous-network (HetNet) architecture. However, due to their mobile characteristics, interference management in the network becomes challenging.