Towards Resilient RANs Through UAV Integration: Landing Positioning Strategy During Blackouts

Power blackouts represent one of the most critical challenges to mobile network resilience, as simultaneous base-station outages can disconnect entire urban regions. This paper examines how rooftop-landed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with base-station payloads can support radio access networks (RANs) during clustered blackouts. We develop a simulation framework that integrates realistic urban morphology, spatially correlated outage dynamics, and UAV energy consumption to evaluate the resilience improvements enabled by UAVs. Results based on a real Zurich scenario demonstrate that the effectiveness of UAVs depends jointly on spatial positioning, blackout timing, and battery endurance. Landing near the blackout centroid maximizes traffic recovery while maintaining acceptable signal quality and extending endurance up to three times that of hovering. The findings demonstrate that rooftop-landed UAV deployment offers a practical solution to enhance RAN resilience, particularly under prolonged power failures.