5G network slicing with unmanned aerial vehicles: Taxonomy, survey, and future directions

Abstract

With the ever‐expanding rise of network demands and user expectations, the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks was envisioned to support a plethora of use cases and conflicting user demands. Next to providing traditional connectivity like its previous generations, 5G also promises to be a heterogeneous network connecting humans, vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), smart devices, and more. These challenging expectations proved to be overwhelming for traditional network infrastructures to handle. Network slicing has emerged as a promising solution that can achieve such diverse, taxing, and sometimes conflicting requirements in a dynamic and programmable way. There is no denying that UAVs have attained significant focus and research in recent years, and with 5G already being deployed, UAVs can now exploit the capabilities of the new networks. Extensive research is being taken to integrate UAVs into networks, assisting and improving aspects like latency, coverage, and capacity. Motivated by these facts, this survey distinguishes itself from other works by jointly exploring 5G, network slicing, and UAVs. The main contributions of this article are to showcase how UAVs can assist networks, provide a taxonomy of UAVs in the context of network slicing, and survey works that contribute to network slicing with UAVs. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on UAVs in the context of network slicing, covering contributions, and state‐of‐the‐art literature. We discuss network slicing in‐depth, focusing especially on the three major slices: enhanced Mobile BroadBand, massive machine type communications, and ultra‐reliable low‐latency communications. We provide an overview of 5G enablers, including software‐defined networking and network function virtualization. We cover UAVs and identify their roles in networks as both users and assistants. Furthermore, this survey provides insight into open issues and future research directions related to network slicing and UAVs before concluding.

Crowd‐sourced and incentive driven UAV system to assist with network slices

“…The work in Reference 5 explores UAV‐assisted networks where 5G mm‐Wave is used for communications. Whereas Reference 2 presents works that feature UAVs as users or assistants to network slices.…”

“…Many works of literature explore the numerous potential applications of UAVs to achieve multiple network tasks. These applications range from aiding in data collection and monitoring, to providing connectivity in rural areas, extending coverage, and more 1,2 …”

“…These applications range from aiding in data collection and monitoring, to providing connectivity in rural areas, extending coverage, and more. 1,2 Moreover, crowd-sourced and incentive-driven solutions are on the rise thanks to the low cost combined with large opportunities and the amount of collected data. Crowd-sourcing can be integrated into multiple scenarios to achieve tasks that are often very resource demanding.…”

An Efficient and Dependable UAV-Assisted Code Dissemination in 5G-Enabled Industrial IoT

“…Building upon this context, our paper extends the exploration to the realm of ISDs in IIoT and their interaction with UAVs. There is no denying that UAVs have attained significant focus and research in recent years, and with 5G already being deployed, UAVs can now exploit the capabilities of the new networks [16]. The unique features of UAVs, such as movement flexibility and efficient code dissemination capabilities, become crucial in addressing the challenges posed by the upgrading ISDs that were not upgraded due to the longtime trailing phenomenon.…”

A Systematic Review of Interference Mitigation Techniques in Current and Future UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

“…In [7], the authors provide a comprehensive study on 5G network slicing with UAVs. The contributions of this research work are to demonstrate the UAV assistance paradigms, provide a classification of UAVs in the context of UAV-assisted network slicing, and provide research works that contribute to UAV-assisted network slicing.…”