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

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

Networks, Communication, and Computing Vol. 2

Networks, communications, and computing have become ubiquitous and inseparable parts of everyday life. This book is based on a Special Issue of the Algorithms journal, and it is devoted to the exploration of the many-faceted relationship of networks, communications, and computing. The included papers explore the current state-of-the-art research in these areas, with a particular interest in the interactions among the fields

Data-Driven 3D Placement of UAV Base Stations for Arbitrarily Distributed Crowds

In this paper, we consider an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted cellular system which consists of multiple UAV base stations (BSs) cooperating the terrestrial BSs. In such a heterogeneous network, for cellular operators, the problem is how to determine the appropriate number, locations, and altitudes of UAV-BSs to improve the system sumrate as well as satisfy the demands of arbitrarily flash crowds on data rates. We propose a data-driven 3D placement of UAV-BSs for providing an effective placement result with a feasible computational cost. The proposed algorithm searches for the appropriate number, location, coverage, and altitude of each UAV-BS in the serving area with the maximized system sumrate in polynomial time so as to guarantee the minimum data rate requirement of UE. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can improve system sumrate in comparison with the case without UAV-BSs.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted by 2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference: Wireless Communications (Globecom2019 WC

Assessing the Performance of a Particle Swarm Optimization Mobility Algorithm in a Hybrid Wi-Fi/LoRa Flying Ad Hoc Network

Research on Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) has increased due to the availability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the electronic components that control and connect them. Many applications, such as 3D mapping, construction inspection, or emergency response operations could benefit from an application and adaptation of swarm intelligence-based deployments of multiple UAVs. Such groups of cooperating UAVs, through the use of local rules, could be seen as network nodes establishing an ad-hoc network for communication purposes. One FANET application is to provide communication coverage over an area where communication infrastructure is unavailable. A crucial part of a FANET implementation is computing the optimal position of UAVs to provide connectivity with ground nodes while maximizing geographic span. To achieve optimal positioning of FANET nodes, an adaptation of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. A 3D mobility model is defined by adapting the original PSO algorithm and combining it with a fixed-trajectory initial flight. A Long Range (LoRa) mesh network is used for air-to-air communication, while a Wi-Fi network provides air-to-ground communication to several ground nodes with unknown positions. The optimization problem has two objectives: maximizing coverage to ground nodes and maintaining an end-to-end communication path to a control station, through the UAV mesh. The results show that the hybrid mobility approach performs similarly to the fixed trajectory flight regarding coverage, and outperforms fixed trajectory and PSO-only algorithms in both path maintenance and overall network efficiency, while using fewer UAVs