Poster: Cell tower extension through drones

Internet connectivity on mobile devices is an essential commodity in today's world. While outdoors, most people connect through cellphone towers on 3G or 4G. However, cell-phone tower coverage is not uniform and is affected by electromagnetic shadows cast by large structures, multipath, and absorption by various surfaces. Users with high data needs suffer in such locations due to insufficient network bandwidth. A similar insufficiency can also be felt by ash crowds in locations with otherwise moderate signal strength due to division of the available bandwidth. We explore the possibility of using drones as a solution to this problem. The drones can hover with direct line of sight with a cellphone tower and extend cellular coverage into the weaker regions. Our idea is to use the knowledge of large structures in the area to compute the expected SNR space around the client's current location. We use ray-tracing techniques to compute the expected SNR in an area. We then verify its similarity with ground truth by measuring, at several locations on the ground, the received signal strength from a Wifi router on a drone.