Cellular-Connected UAV: Uplink Association, Power Control and Interference Coordination

The peculiar line-of-sight (LoS) propagation in air-to-ground channel provides both opportunities and challenges for the emerging cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. On one hand, the LoS channels make more cellular base stations (BSs) visible to a UAV as compared to ground users, which leads to a higher macro-diversity gain as compared to the ground users. On the other hand, the LoS channels also render the UAV to generate/receive more severe uplink/downlink interference to/from the BSs, thus requiring more sophisticated inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques with more BSs involved. To draw essential insight, this paper studies the uplink transmission from a UAV to cellular BSs. To mitigate the UAV's interference effect, we aim to maximize the sum-rate of the UAV and all ground users in its resulted ICIC region by jointly optimizing the UAV's cell association, resource block (RB) allocation, and transmit power. We first propose a centralized ICIC design that achieves the optimal performance. As the centralized ICIC requires global information of the network and substantial information exchange among an excessively large number of BSs, we further propose a decentralized ICIC scheme of significantly lower complexity and overhead for implementation. Specifically, we divide the cellular BSs into clusters, each with a dedicated cluster head for collecting information from its cluster BSs and exchanging information with the UAV by exploiting the LoS-induced macro-diversity. Numerical results show that the proposed decentralized ICIC scheme achieves a performance close to the optimal centralized design, and also outperforms the traditional ICIC scheme for cellular networks with terrestrial interference only.