Planning UAV Activities for Efficient User Coverage in Disaster Areas

Climate changes brought about by global warming as well as man-made environmental changes are often the cause of sever natural disasters. ICT, which is itself responsible for global warming due to its high carbon footprint, can play a role in alleviating the consequences of such hazards by providing reliable, resilient means of communication during a disaster crisis. In this paper, we explore the provision of wireless coverage through UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to complement, or replace, the traditional communication infrastructure. The use of UAVs is indeed crucial in emergency scenarios, as they allow for the quick and easy deployment of micro and pico cellular base stations where needed. We characterize the movements of UAVs and define an optimization problem to determine the best UAV coverage that maximizes the user throughput, while maintaining fairness across the different parts of the geographical area that has been affected by the disaster. To evaluate our strategy, we simulate a flooding in San Francisco and the car traffic resulting from people seeking safety on higher ground

A Survey on UAV-Aided Maritime Communications: Deployment Considerations, Applications, and Future Challenges

Maritime activities represent a major domain of economic growth with several emerging maritime Internet of Things use cases, such as smart ports, autonomous navigation, and ocean monitoring systems. The major enabler for this exciting ecosystem is the provision of broadband, low-delay, and reliable wireless coverage to the ever-increasing number of vessels, buoys, platforms, sensors, and actuators. Towards this end, the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in maritime communications introduces an aerial dimension to wireless connectivity going above and beyond current deployments, which are mainly relying on shore-based base stations with limited coverage and satellite links with high latency. Considering the potential of UAV-aided wireless communications, this survey presents the state-of-the-art in UAV-aided maritime communications, which, in general, are based on both conventional optimization and machine-learning-aided approaches. More specifically, relevant UAV-based network architectures are discussed together with the role of their building blocks. Then, physical-layer, resource management, and cloud/edge computing and caching UAV-aided solutions in maritime environments are discussed and grouped based on their performance targets. Moreover, as UAVs are characterized by flexible deployment with high re-positioning capabilities, studies on UAV trajectory optimization for maritime applications are thoroughly discussed. In addition, aiming at shedding light on the current status of real-world deployments, experimental studies on UAV-aided maritime communications are presented and implementation details are given. Finally, several important open issues in the area of UAV-aided maritime communications are given, related to the integration of sixth generation (6G) advancements

Communication Technologies Enabling Effective UAV Networks: A Standards Perspective

[EN] Recent developments in the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) field have made evident the need for a standardization process of the communication technologies supporting direct information exchange, thus enabling UAV-to-UAV networking. We consider this is necessary to achieve all sorts of cooperative tasks requiring real-time (or near-real-time) synchronization, including swarm formation and collision avoidance. In this article, we therefore argue in favor of introducing a new standard that would address this specific area, highlighting why current technologies are not adequate, what the different steps toward rapid standardization are, and which lessons have been learned from related fields, namely the vehicular and robotic environments, in the past few years.This work is derived from R&D project RTI2018-096384-B-I00 funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF A way of making Europe.Vegni, AM.; Loscri, V.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Manzoni, P. (2021). Communication Technologies Enabling Effective UAV Networks: A Standards Perspective. IEEE Communications Standards Magazine. 5(4):33-40. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOMSTD.0001.2000074S33405