Abstract
This letter proposes a cloud-aerial radio access network (CA-RAN) architecture utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to rapidly deploy mobile networks for disaster recovery and emergency situations. The architecture aims to provide reliable and energy-efficient data coverage through the use of millimeter-wave bands for increased data rates and both RF and solar energy harvesting techniques for sustainable energy provision. To improve the system’s reliability, an opportunistic selective scheme is implemented. We evaluate the performance of the CA-RAN based system using the energy-outage probability metric, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied in UAV-based networks. Finally, numerical results are presented to illustrate the impact of different parameters on the system’s performance.