A Novel UAV-aided User Offloading in 5G and beyond

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a promising solution to perform cellular user offloading in dynamic hotspot scenarios. The users from overloaded gNodeB (gNB) can be offloaded to a neighbouring underloaded gNB using UAVs as relays. In this paper, we propose a novel UAV-aided cellular user offloading that uses Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) for handling interference. Our proposed solution can be used for dynamic hotspots that occur in both cell-centered and cell-edge areas. We do not use any unlicensed band for communication between users and UAV, thereby avoid contention between cellular technologies and technologies that use unlicensed bands such as WiFi. As the users perform SIC for retrieving the signal, user association, location of UAV, and power levels of UAV and gNB are crucial for providing the promised data rates to the users, so that the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not violated. Therefore, we formulate the problem to minimize the SLA violations by jointly optimizing the location of UAV, power levels of gNB and UAV, bandwidth allocation and user association. Further, we propose a solution to the formulated problem and show the effectiveness of our proposed solution using extensive numerical simulations. The proposed solution is shown to significantly decrease the total cost of SLA violations and increase the total available rate for the users of the overloaded gNB.