Cellular network offloading through Drone Cooperation.

Base station (BS) capacity for cellular networks is fixed and therefore cannot be easily adapted to support temporary high demands due to unusual traffic (demonstration, sales, competitions, etc.). Unmanned Ariel Vehicle (UAV)/drone can be used as an additional temporary bandwidth (BW) provider capable of covering multiple cells.Two placement approaches are investigated to optimize UAV deployment for this purpose. The first adopts a rule based approach without cooperation: we place UAVs in the cells where the exceeding demand is the highest, allowing each UAV to only serve a single cell at a time. In the second algorithm, relying on the Knapsack problem, we design a solution where UAVs cooperate by sharing a portion of their available BW with neighbouring cells in order to cover all the demand with the lowest possible amount of drones. Their performance is compared using two months of real dataset from the Milan Cellular Network provided by Telecom Italia.