246 research outputs found
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 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
Motion Planning of UAV Swarm: Recent Challenges and Approaches
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm is gaining massive interest for researchers as it has huge significance over a single UAV. Many studies focus only on a few challenges of this complex multidisciplinary group. Most of them have certain limitations. This paper aims to recognize and arrange relevant research for evaluating motion planning techniques and models for a swarm from the viewpoint of control, path planning, architecture, communication, monitoring and tracking, and safety issues. Then, a state-of-the-art understanding of the UAV swarm and an overview of swarm intelligence (SI) are provided in this research. Multiple challenges are considered, and some approaches are presented. Findings show that swarm intelligence is leading in this era and is the most significant approach for UAV swarm that offers distinct contributions in different environments. This integration of studies will serve as a basis for knowledge concerning swarm, create guidelines for motion planning issues, and strengthens support for existing methods. Moreover, this paper possesses the capacity to engender new strategies that can serve as the grounds for future work
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
- …