Machine Learning assisted Handover and Resource Management for Cellular Connected Drones

--Enabling cellular connectivity for drones introduces a wide set of challenges and opportunities. Communication of cellular-connected drones is influenced by 3-dimensional mobility and line-of-sight channel characteristics which results in higher number of handovers with increasing altitude. Our cell planning simulations in coexistence of aerial and terrestrial users indicate that the severe interference from drones to base stations is a major challenge for uplink communications of terrestrial users. Here, we first present the major challenges in coexistence of terrestrial and drone communications by considering real geographical network data for Stockholm. Then, we derive analytical models for the key performance indicators (KPIs), including communications delay and interference over cellular networks, and formulate the handover and radio resource management (H-RRM) optimization problem. Afterwards, we transform this problem into a machine learning problem, and propose a deep reinforcement learning solution to solve H-RRM problem. Especially, the heat-maps of handover decisions in different drone's altitudes/speeds have been presented, which promote a revision of the legacy handover schemes and redefining the boundaries of cells in the sky. I NTRODUCTION Commercial drone applications have attracted profound interest in recent years in a wide set of use-cases, including area monitoring, surveillance, and delivery [1].