Drone-Small-Cell-Assisted Spectrum Management for 5G and Beyond Vehicular Networks

With advancements in cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) and drone manufacturing technologies, integrating drone-small-cells (DSCs) into terrestrial cellular networks is a promising solution to enabling diversified vehicle applications. In this paper, a multi-DSC-assisted dynamic spectrum management framework is presented to maximize the network utility under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints in 5G and beyond cellular vehicular networks. The network utility maximization problem is formulated as mixed-integer nonlinear programming regarding association patterns between vehicles and base stations (BSs) and spectrum partitioning among heterogeneous BSs. For mathematical tractability, the joint optimization problem for spectrum partitioning and vehicle-DSC associations is transformed as a biconcave optimization problem. An alternate search algorithm is then designed to determine vehicle association patterns and spectrum slicing ratios. Our simulation demonstrates that compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed scheme achieves a significant performance improvement in network throughput and spectrum utilization.