Job Selection in a Network of Autonomous UAVs for Delivery of Goods

This article analyzes two classes of job selection policies that control how a network of autonomous aerial vehicles delivers goods from depots to customers. Customer requests (jobs) occur according to a spatio-temporal stochastic process not known by the system. If job selection uses a policy in which the first job (FJ) is served first, the system may collapse to instability by removing just one vehicle. Policies that serve the nearest job (NJ) first show such threshold behavior only in some settings and can be implemented in a distributed manner. The timing of job selection has significant impact on delivery time and stability for NJ while it has no impact for FJ. Based on these findings we introduce a methodological approach for decision-making support to set up and operate such a system, taking into account the trade-off between monetary cost and service quality. In particular, we compute a lower bound for the infrastructure expenditure required to achieve a certain expected delivery time. The approach includes three time horizons: long-term decisions on the number of depots to deploy in the service area, mid-term decisions on the number of vehicles to use, and short-term decisions on the policy to operate the vehicles

Job selection in a network of autonomous UAVs for delivery of goods

This article analyzes two classes of job selection policies that control how a network of autonomous aerial vehicles delivers goods from depots to customers. Customer requests (jobs) occur according to a spatio-temporal stochastic process not known by the system. If job selection uses a policy in which the first job (FJ) is served first, the system may collapse to instability by removing just one vehicle. Policies that serve the nearest job (NJ) first show such threshold behavior only in some settings and can be implemented in a distributed manner. The timing of job selection has significant impact on delivery time and stability for NJ while it has no impact for FJ. Based on these findings we introduce a methodological approach for decision- making support to set up and operate such a system, taking into account the trade-off between monetary cost and service quality. In particular, we compute a lower bound for the infrastructure expenditure required to achieve a certain expected delivery time. The approach includes three time horizons: long-term decisions on the number of depots to deploy in the service area, mid- term decisions on the number of vehicles to use, and short-term decisions on the policy to operate the vehicles

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

Wireless Communications Challenges to Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET)

The increasing demand for Internet access from more and more different devices in recent years has provided a challenge for companies and the academic community to research and develop new solutions that support the increasing flow in the network, applications that require very low latencies and more dynamic and scalable infrastructures, in this context the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) emerged as a possible solution and applying this technology in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) was developed the flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) which are wireless networks independent, its main characteristics are to have high mobility, scalability for different applications and scenarios and robustness to deal with possible communication failures. However, they still have several constraints such as limited flight time of UAVs and routing protocols that are capable of supporting network dynamics. To analyze this scenario, two simulations were developed where it was possible to observe the behavior of FANET with different routing protocols both during data transmission and video transmission. The results show that the choice of the best routing protocol must take into account the mobility of the UAVs and the necessary communication priority in the network