4,547 research outputs found
Predator empire: the geopolitics of U.S. drone warfare
This paper critically assesses the CIA’s drone program and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly paramilitarized U.S. national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponized drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilize an amorphous war against vaguely defined al-Qa’ida “affiliates”. This is further legitimized by the White House’s presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic task managed by a “disposition matrix”. Such abstract narratives are challenged through the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I call the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that catalogues and eliminates threatening “patterns of life”. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the environments of the “affiliate” into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks with UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence
Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of
cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the
fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to
achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with
mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to
support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband
(eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive
machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as
cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced
communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and
controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other
hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and
ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal
coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the
requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support
effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also
essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting
aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of
the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an
emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting
surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and
radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service
requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight
important directions for further investigation in future work.Comment: Accepted by IEEE JSA
Implementing Cooperative Behavior & Control Using Open Source Technology Across Heterogeneous Vehicles
This thesis describes the research effort into implementing cooperative behavior and control across heterogeneous vehicles using low cost off-the-shelf technologies and open source software. Current cooperative behavior and control methods are explored and improved upon to build analysis models. These analysis models characterize ideal factor settings for implementation and establish limits of performance for these low cost approaches to cooperative behavior and control. The research focused on latency and position accuracy as the two measures of performance. Three different ground control station (GCS) software applications and two types of vehicles, rover ground vehicles and aerial multi-rotors, were used in this research. Using optimum factor settings from Design of Experiments (DOE), the multi-rotor following rover vehicle configuration experienced almost twice the latency of other experiments but also the lowest positional error of 0.8 m. Results show that the achieved update frequency of 0.5 Hz or slower would be far too slow for close-formation flight
Multiple Access in Aerial Networks: From Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal to Rate-Splitting
Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has
aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users
for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS)
for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense
environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high
requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques
have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access(SDMA) and
power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising
multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains
are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a
generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple
access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains
compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of
key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are
deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results
reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion
on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a
two-user downlink network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open
issues and future research directions are exposed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Journa
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