576 research outputs found
Establishing and optimising unmanned airborne relay networks in urban environments
This thesis assesses the use of a group of small, low-altitude, low-power (in terms of communication equipment), xed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a mobile communication relay nodes to facilitate reliable communication between ground nodes in urban environments. This work focuses on enhancing existing models for optimal trajectory planning and enabling UAV relay implementation in realistic urban scenarios. The performance of the proposed UAV relay algorithms was demonstrated and proved through an indoor simulated urban environment, the rst experiment of its kind.The objective of enabling UAV relay deployment in realistic urban environments is addressed through relaxing the constraints on the assumptions of communication prediction models assumptions, reducing knowledge requirements and improving prediction efficiency. This thesis explores assumptions for urban environment knowledge at three different levels: (i) full knowledge about the urban environment, (ii) partially known urban environments, and (iii) no knowledge about the urban environment. The work starts with exploring models that assume the city size, layout and its effects on wireless communication strength are known, representing full knowledge about the urban environment. [Continues.]</div
Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges
With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing
number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed
and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected.
Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime
satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency
and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base
stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks
using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services.
Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs.
Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient
maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated
electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS
sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications,
conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be
tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the
demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key
technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage,
and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an
environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to
be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and
atmosphere conditions, are also discussed
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Smart Cities: Research Challenges and Opportunities
The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced as a way to benefit from the
digitization of various ecosystems at a city level. To support this concept,
future communication networks need to be carefully designed with respect to the
city infrastructure and utilization of resources. Recently, the idea of 'smart'
environment, which takes advantage of the infrastructure for better performance
of wireless networks, has been proposed. This idea is aligned with the recent
advances in design of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are
planar structures with the capability to reflect impinging electromagnetic
waves toward preferred directions. Thus, RISs are expected to provide the
necessary flexibility for the design of the 'smart' communication environment,
which can be optimally shaped to enable cost- and energy-efficient signal
transmissions where needed. Upon deployment of RISs, the ecosystem of the Smart
Cities would become even more controllable and adaptable, which would
subsequently ease the implementation of future communication networks in urban
areas and boost the interconnection among private households and public
services. In this paper, we describe our vision of the application of RISs in
future Smart Cities. In particular, the research challenges and opportunities
are addressed. The contribution paves the road to a systematic design of
RIS-assisted communication networks for Smart Cities in the years to come.Comment: Submitted for possible publication in IEEE Open Journal of the
Communications Societ
Networks, Communication, and Computing Vol. 2
Networks, communications, and computing have become ubiquitous and inseparable parts of everyday life. This book is based on a Special Issue of the Algorithms journal, and it is devoted to the exploration of the many-faceted relationship of networks, communications, and computing. The included papers explore the current state-of-the-art research in these areas, with a particular interest in the interactions among the fields
Uav-assisted data collection in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed to different areas of interest to sense phenomena, process sensed data, and take actions accordingly. The networks are integrated with many advanced technologies to be able to fulfill their tasks that is becoming more and more complicated. These networks tend to connect to multimedia networks and to process huge data over long distances. Due to the limited resources of static sensor nodes, WSNs need to cooperate with mobile robots such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in their developments. The mobile devices show their maneuverability, computational and energystorage abilities to support WSNs in multimedia networks. This paper addresses a comprehensive survey of almost scenarios utilizing UAVs and UGVs with strogly emphasising on UAVs for data collection in WSNs. Either UGVs or UAVs can collect data from static sensor nodes in the monitoring fields. UAVs can either work alone to collect data or can cooperate with other UAVs to increase their coverage in their working fields. Different techniques to support the UAVs are addressed in this survey. Communication links, control algorithms, network structures and different mechanisms are provided and compared. Energy consumption or transportation cost for such scenarios are considered. Opening issues and challenges are provided and suggested for the future developments
Self-Evolving Integrated Vertical Heterogeneous Networks
6G and beyond networks tend towards fully intelligent and adaptive design in
order to provide better operational agility in maintaining universal wireless
access and supporting a wide range of services and use cases while dealing with
network complexity efficiently. Such enhanced network agility will require
developing a self-evolving capability in designing both the network
architecture and resource management to intelligently utilize resources, reduce
operational costs, and achieve the coveted quality of service (QoS). To enable
this capability, the necessity of considering an integrated vertical
heterogeneous network (VHetNet) architecture appears to be inevitable due to
its high inherent agility. Moreover, employing an intelligent framework is
another crucial requirement for self-evolving networks to deal with real-time
network optimization problems. Hence, in this work, to provide a better insight
on network architecture design in support of self-evolving networks, we
highlight the merits of integrated VHetNet architecture while proposing an
intelligent framework for self-evolving integrated vertical heterogeneous
networks (SEI-VHetNets). The impact of the challenges associated with
SEI-VHetNet architecture, on network management is also studied considering a
generalized network model. Furthermore, the current literature on network
management of integrated VHetNets along with the recent advancements in
artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) solutions are discussed.
Accordingly, the core challenges of integrating AI/ML in SEI-VHetNets are
identified. Finally, the potential future research directions for advancing the
autonomous and self-evolving capabilities of SEI-VHetNets are discussed.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures, 2 table
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking
The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out
- …