Coverage and power gain of aerial versus terrestrial base stations

Aerial stations have been recently recognized as an attractive alternative to provide wireless services to terrestrial users thanks to their superior coverage capability. In this paper, the coverage and power gain that can be achieved by a drone with respect to a terrestrial base station are studied. We address the problem by characterizing the coverage area based on the network outage probability, taking into account the height depending fading and path loss exponent that characterize air-to-ground wireless links. Results show that there exist a unique optimal altitude that provides the largest coverage and power gain, which strikes a fine balance between the path loss, due to the higher altitude, and a reduced influence of the multipath scattering. While numerical evaluations show that even at low altitudes the network gains up to 4x coverage or 20 dB power, the gain achieved at optimal altitude can be higher