A Survey on Cellular-connected UAVs: Design Challenges, Enabling 5G/B5G Innovations, and Experimental Advancements

As an emerging field of aerial robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant research interest within the wireless networking research community. As soon as national legislations allow UAVs to fly autonomously, we will see swarms of UAV populating the sky of our smart cities to accomplish different missions: parcel delivery, infrastructure monitoring, event filming, surveillance, tracking, etc. The UAV ecosystem can benefit from existing 5G/B5G cellular networks, which can be exploited in different ways to enhance UAV communications. Because of the inherent characteristics of UAV pertaining to flexible mobility in 3D space, autonomous operation and intelligent placement, these smart devices cater to wide range of wireless applications and use cases. This work aims at presenting an in-depth exploration of integration synergies between 5G/B5G cellular systems and UAV technology, where the UAV is integrated as a new aerial User Equipment (UE) to existing cellular networks. In this integration, the UAVs perform the role of flying users within cellular coverage, thus they are termed as cellular-connected UAVs (a.k.a. UAV-UE, drone-UE, 5G-connected drone, or aerial user). The main focus of this work is to present an extensive study of integration challenges along with key 5G/B5G technological innovations and ongoing efforts in design prototyping and field trials corroborating cellular-connected UAVs. This study highlights recent progress updates with respect to 3GPP standardization and emphasizes socio-economic concerns that must be accounted before successful adoption of this promising technology. Various open problems paving the path to future research opportunities are also discussed.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figures, 9 tables, 102 references, journal submissio

Internet of Things over future internet

Everyday objects surrounding us including numerous sensors weaved into the daily fabric of life are becoming online, that is, readable and controllable via Internet, these days. By providing a new ecosystem of information, this notion, termed Internet of Things (IoT) will drastically change our ways to interact with real world. Meanwhile, current Internet is facing various challenges such as exponential growth in bandwidth demand. The realization of IoT is also putting current Internet under great pressure due to its unprecedented scale—according to some forecasts, IoT, an integral part of the “future” Internet, will consist of over 50 billion connected things. To cope with such bandwidth demand and complexity as well as to solve other issues, for example, seamless wireless access and mobility support, and security, with current Internet, new architectures for the future Internet have been proposed, for example, information/content centric network architectures and cloud-computing centric network architectures. However, several questions still remain: how IoT will be supported in the future Internet architectures, that is, when deploying large-scale wireless sensor networks do we need to fully integrate embedded sensors with Internet or use dedicated gateways to bridge sensors and Internet similar to state-of-the-art technologies? The aim of this Special Issue is to answer various open questions in realizing IoT over future Internet technologies. The Special Issue includes extended papers forwarded from the seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2015) and other contributions from outside the conference highly related to IoT in future Internet. Specifically, 6 high-quality papers out of 18 submitted have been accepted

Lunar Science: Internet for Space Tourism

The increased interest in space exploration drives the development of novel technologies that are useful in other areas, such as aviation. The use of these technologies gives rise to new challenges and applications. Space tourism is an emerging application due to advances in space exploration technologies. This paper addresses two challenges aimed at ensuring continued internet access in space tourism. The first is designing network architecture to ensure continued internet access for space tourists aboard a space vehicle. The second is using aerial vehicle technology to enhance access to cloud content in areas with poor telecommunication infrastructure. The paper proposes the distributed handover algorithm ensuring that the space vehicle can execute handover from terrestrial wireless networks to aerial platforms and satellites as a last mile connection. It also proposes the concept of aerial diversity ensuring low cost access to cloud content. Performance simulation shows that the use of the distributed handover algorithm enhances channel capacity by 18.4% on average and reduces latency by 11.6% on average. The use of the cloud content access system incorporating aerial diversity enhances the channel capacity of terrestrial wireless networks by up to 85% on average

A Simulator for Creating Drones Networks and Providing Users Connectivity

Unmanned aerial vehicles are devices able to perform many different tasks that can help human activity in many processes. One of the most important use regards the possibility of giving wireless connectivity to user in a specific area. These new typologies of networks are called Flying Adhoc Network. Their use benefit all those situations of emergency where the traditional communications may have many issues, due to the specific event. Different types of natural disasters (such as climatological, meteorological, hydrological, geophysical) can result in many deaths and many economic damages. In these situations, drones can provide an additional or complementary access network, supporting web services and multimedia traffic, helping people involved in the rescue. Hence, it is clear that the possibility of using a simulator can result in a huge help to the research community. So, in this work, a Flying Ad-hoc Network simulator is proposed, able to simulate different scenarios with different coverage areas. In particular, emphasis is given to new coverage and human mobility models, in order to support more realistic situations. Some simulations have been led out to show how the simulator works

Employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Improving Handoff using Cooperative Game Theory

Heterogeneous wireless networks that are used for seamless mobility are expected to face prominent problems in future 5G cellular networks. Due to their proper flexibility and adaptable preparation, remote-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) could assist heterogeneous wireless communication. However, the key challenges of current UAV-assisted communications consist in having appropriate accessibility over wireless networks via mobile devices with an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) grounded on the users' preferences. To this end, we propose a novel method based on cooperative game theory to select the best UAV during handover process and optimize handover among UAVs by decreasing the (i) end-to-end delay, (ii) handover latency and (iii) signaling overheads. Moreover, the standard design of Software Defined Network (SDN) with Media Independent Handover (MIH) is used as forwarding switches in order to obtain seamless mobility. Numerical results derived from the real data are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of number of handovers, cost and delay