Enhancing Emergency Communications via UAV-Assisted Home-Independent Broadband Mobile Networks

Natural disasters often lead to significant communication breakdowns due to direct damage and indirect effects on communication infrastructure. Advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, combined with its integration into wireless networks, present promising avenues for mitigating these challenges. However, a primary limitation of current solutions is that UAV-carried base stations are tied exclusively to a single telecommunications provider, limiting service access to subscribers of that provider and excluding others, particularly affecting user equipment (UE) in disaster zones. To overcome this barrier, we propose a UAV-assisted home-independent broadband mobile communication network that allows UEs from multiple operators to connect to a unified network and access broadband services. We have developed the architecture for this network and a signaling process that enables UEs to connect to this home-independent cellular network. This architecture allows UEs associated with various telecom operators to join the proposed network and establish data links efficiently. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network architecture, showing good performance in signal coverage, packet transmission rate, round-trip time, and signal strength, which shows that our proposed scheme works very well.