Performance Analysis of Micro Unmanned Airborne Communication Relays for Cellular Networks

This paper analyses the potential of utilising small unmanned-aerial-vehicles (SUAV) as wireless relays for assisting cellular network performance. Whilst high altitude wireless relays have been investigated over the past 2 decades, the new class of low cost SUAVs offers new possibilities for addressing local traffic imbalances and providing emergency coverage.We present field-test results from an SUAV test-bed in both urban and rural environments. The results show that trough-to-peak throughput improvements can be achieved for users in poor coverage zones. Furthermore, the paper reinforces the experimental study with large-scale network analysis using both stochastic geometry and multi-cell simulation results.Comment: conferenc

Communication and Control in Collaborative UAVs: Recent Advances and Future Trends

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs

Optimal Jammer Placement in UAV-assisted Relay Networks

We consider the relaying application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in which UAVs are placed between two transceivers (TRs) to increase the throughput of the system. Instead of studying the placement of UAVs as pursued in existing literature, we focus on investigating the placement of a jammer or a major source of interference on the ground to effectively degrade the performance of the system, which is measured by the maximum achievable data rate of transmission between the TRs. We demonstrate that the optimal placement of the jammer is in general a non-convex optimization problem, for which obtaining the solution directly is intractable. Afterward, using the inherent characteristics of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) expressions, we propose a tractable approach to find the optimal position of the jammer. Based on the proposed approach, we investigate the optimal positioning of the jammer in both dual-hop and multi-hop UAV relaying settings. Numerical simulations are provided to evaluate the performance of our proposed method.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure