Beyond RSRP Coverage: UAV Serviceability in Interference-Limited Urban 5G NR Networks

Abstract

Reference signal received power (RSRP) is commonly used to assess 5G cellular coverage, but it may substantially overestimate the connectivity available to cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under strong intercell interference (ICI). As a UAV ascends, reduced blockage can strengthen the serving signal, while increased line-of-sight visibility to neighboring sectors can intensify ICI. This paper develops a trajectory-aware, 3GPP-based system-level framework for evaluating UAV radio serviceability during a three-dimensional flight in an urban 5G New Radio network. The framework jointly evaluates RSRP, reference signal received quality (RSRQ), and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in a 19-site, 57-sector deployment. We introduce the concept of coverage-serviceability gap to quantify the difference between RSRP availability and joint service availability. Under evaluation thresholds of -100 dBm for RSRP, -20 dB for RSRQ, and 0 dB for SINR, an inter-site distance (ISD) of 500 m provides 99.9% RSRP availability but only 13.6% joint service availability, yielding a gap of 86.3 percentage points. Increasing the ISD to 1000 m improves mean SINR and joint availability from 13.6% to 18.4%, while SINR remains the dominant constraint. Results averaged over three independent simulation realizations show that RSRP-based aerial coverage does not necessarily translate into mission-level radio serviceability, motivating trajectory-aware, multi-key performance metric (KPM) aerial radio planning.