633 research outputs found
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
Reliable and Secure Drone-assisted MillimeterWave Communications
The next generation of mobile networks and wireless communication, including the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond, will provide a high data rate as one of its fundamental requirements. Providing high data rates can be accomplished through communication over high-frequency bands such as the Millimeter-Wave(mmWave) one. However, mmWave communication experiences short-range communication, which impacts the overall network connectivity. Improving network connectivity can be accomplished through deploying Unmanned Ariel Vehicles(UAVs), commonly known as drones, which serve as aerial small-cell base stations. Moreover, drone deployment is of special interest in recovering network connectivity in the aftermath of disasters. Despite the potential advantages, drone-assisted networks can be more vulnerable to security attacks, given their limited capabilities. This security vulnerability is especially true in the aftermath of a disaster where security measures could be at their lowest. This thesis focuses on drone-assisted mmWave communication networks with their potential to provide reliable communication in terms of higher network connectivity measures, higher total network data rate, and lower end-to-end delay. Equally important, this thesis focuses on proposing and developing security measures needed for drone-assisted networks’ secure operation. More specifically, we aim to employ a swarm of drones to have more connection, reliability, and secure communication over the mmWave band. Finally, we target both the cellular 5Gnetwork and Ad hoc IEEE802.11ad/ay in typical network deployments as well as in post-disaster circumstances
Towards UAV Assisted 5G Public Safety Network
Ensuring ubiquitous mission-critical public safety communications (PSC) to all the first responders in the public safety network is crucial at an emergency site. The first responders heavily rely on mission-critical PSC to save lives, property, and national infrastructure during a natural or human-made emergency. The recent advancements in LTE/LTE-Advanced/5G mobile technologies supported by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have great potential to revolutionize PSC.
However, limited spectrum allocation for LTE-based PSC demands improved channel capacity and spectral efficiency. An additional challenge in designing an LTE-based PSC network is achieving at least 95% coverage of the geographical area and human population with broadband rates. The coverage requirement and efficient spectrum use in the PSC network can be realized through the dense deployment of small cells (both terrestrial and aerial). However, there are several challenges with the dense deployment of small cells in an air-ground heterogeneous network (AG-HetNet). The main challenges which are addressed in this research work are integrating UAVs as both aerial user and aerial base-stations, mitigating inter-cell interference, capacity and coverage enhancements, and optimizing deployment locations of aerial base-stations.
First, LTE signals were investigated using NS-3 simulation and software-defined radio experiment to gain knowledge on the quality of service experienced by the user equipment (UE). Using this understanding, a two-tier LTE-Advanced AG-HetNet with macro base-stations and unmanned aerial base-stations (UABS) is designed, while considering time-domain inter-cell interference coordination techniques. We maximize the capacity of this AG-HetNet in case of a damaged PSC infrastructure by jointly optimizing the inter-cell interference parameters and UABS locations using a meta-heuristic genetic algorithm (GA) and the brute-force technique. Finally, considering the latest specifications in 3GPP, a more realistic three-tier LTE-Advanced AG-HetNet is proposed with macro base-stations, pico base-stations, and ground UEs as terrestrial nodes and UABS and aerial UEs as aerial nodes. Using meta-heuristic techniques such as GA and elitist harmony search algorithm based on the GA, the critical network elements such as energy efficiency, inter-cell interference parameters, and UABS locations are all jointly optimized to maximize the capacity and coverage of the AG-HetNet
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
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