A survey on unmanned aerial vehicle relaying networks

Abstract

With the explosive growth of data communications, existing infrastructure networks are under ever-increasing pressure. Due to the advantages of fully controllable mobility, rapid deployment, and low cost, the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted much attentions from both industry and academia in recent years, and it has become an inevitable trend to employ UAVs to enhance the network performance in different environments.As an important paradigm of UAV-assisted communications, UAV relaying communications has been regarded as a promising solution in enhancing connectivity and improving transmission rate. This paper for the first time comprehensively summarizes UAV relaying communications and its application scenarios, including single UAV relaying networks, multi-user UAV relaying networks, multi-hop UAV relaying networks, as well as Internet of UAVs, and deeply analyzes the key technologies and challenges to be solved under this topic. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art researches and opportunities of UAV relaying communications are discussed in detail. INTRODUCTIONWith the dramatic development of wireless communications as well as the rapid increase in the scale and variety of mobile communication services, the amount of data to be transmitted is constantly exploding. And thus mobile data transmissions with high capacity, high speed, and high coverage has become the focus of attention in the industry, which is also an urgent problem to be solved. In this regard, the existing wireless communication system seems to be insufficient. Fortunately, the application of UAV-assisted communications provides opportunities to solve this problem, which can be employed as a supplement and extension of current communication systems to improve the performance [1,2]. In recent decades, with the continuous maturity of technologies such as flight control, navigation, power, and communications, the safety and reliability of UAVs have also been constantly improved, so the applicationThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

UAV-Assisted RIS for Future Wireless Communications: A Survey on Optimization and Performance Analysis

“…Compared to other technologies such as standalone UAV system and standalone RIS system with various emerging technologies, the combined system with the same technologies such as NOMA, OFDMA, VLC, FSO, IoT, and machine learning provides enhanced performance in various parameters and real-world scenarios. Compared to the surveys provided on RIS [45]- [48] and UAV [50]- [53], our survey paper provides a combined view of recent research towards the UAV-assisted RIS field. Table 9 provides a summary of the survey in comparison to the various performance parameters.…”

“…In [52], the authors have surveyed the requirements of UAVs such as connectivity, adaptability, privacy, security, and safety. In [53], the author has surveyed the implementation of UAVs with relaying networks. As we know, energy consumption plays a major role in either enhancing or diminishing the performance of a UAV.…”

“…Reference Contribution [45] Explores the performance of RIS in PLS under different performance metrics and antenna classification [46] Implementation of deep learning techniques with RIS assisted Wireless networks [47] Discusses RIS performance in implementation with wireless networks with various optimization techniques at RIS and in the network [48] RIS-assisted THz communications and studies on implementing it with 6G networks [49] Survey on state-of-the-art technologies of RIS and its performance analysis [50] Insights and challenges on the performance of UAV assisted communication networks [51] Integration of UAV with IoT presented in various domains [52] UAV networks for enhancing the adaptability, privacy, secrecy, and scalability [53] Survey on UAV-assisted relaying networks with state-of-the-art technologies Our paper Survey on implementing the UAV-assisted RIS system in various optimization techniques and emerging technologies performance of the system. Table 3 provides a brief summary of the discussions below.…”

Bearing-based Autonomous Communication Relay Positioning under Field-of-View Constraints

“…Our major contribution rests upon an innovative method leveraging bearing-based formation control in which the need for both a centralized level of coordination and distance measurements is completely removed, providing advantages such as mitigating the effect of a single point of failure and, more generally, expanding the most recent and cutting edge findings in this research front (see, e.g., 45 ). More precisely, the objective is to drive the RV to a position for relay establishment in a planar environment while maintaining the other vehicles inside of its FoV and avoiding collisions.…”

Distributed mechanism design for multi‐cell communications aided by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces

“…To support such great demands, multi-cell frequency reuse has been widely applied in the cellular networks to fully exploit the sparse spectrum resources. Existing enabling techniques include massive MIMO and ultra-dense small cells [3,4]. However, they either rely on a large-scale deployment of base stations (BS) or involve high costs of hardware and power consumption.…”