Tutorial on UAVs: A Blue Sky View onWireless Communication

Abstract

The growing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for various applications requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity for safe control and data exchange between these devices and ground terminals. Depending on the application, UAV-mounted wireless equipment can either be an aerial user equipment (AUE) that co-exists with the terrestrial users, or it can be a part of wireless infrastructure providing a range of services to the ground users. For instance, AUE can be used for real-time search and rescue and/or video streaming (surveillance, broadcasting) and Aerial Base Station (ABS) can enhance coverage, capacity and energy efficiency of wireless networks. In both cases, UAV-based solutions are scalable, mobile, easy and fast to deploy. However, several technical challenges have to be addressed before such solutions will become widely used. In this work, we present a tutorial on wireless communication with UAVs, taking into account a wide range of potential applications. The main goal of this work is to provide a complete overview of the main scenarios (AUE and ABS), channel and performance models, compare them, and discuss open research points. This work is intended to serve as a tutorial for wireless communication with UAVs, which gives a comprehensive overview of the research done until now and depicts a comprehensive picture to foster new ideas and solutions while avoiding duplication of past work. We start by discussing the open challenges of

Wireless Communication for Safe UAVs: From Long-Range Deconfliction to Short-Range Collision Avoidance

“…For instance, in telecommunications, collision avoidance is often used for describing techniques used to avoid resource contention during an information transmission. Moreover, the same term is used for describing a physical collision, as in [3,5], but this definition is still much more general than the one used in avionics.…”

“…For this reason, several technologies were used in [13] such as LoRa (Long Range Wide Area Network), and APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). In [3], it was shown that Wi-Fi also suffers from interference, which results in problems with establishing a reliable connection between 2 nodes (2 UAVs, or UAV and the ground controller/UTM infrastructure). However, embedding the coordinates and drone ID in Wi-Fi Service Set Identifier (SSID) allows to broadcast this critical data in an ADS-B like manner, as it was shown in [14].…”

“…In prior art, cellular-connected drones received a lot of attention [3,5]. However, most of the published works are concentrated on the link-level metrics.…”

“…One important extension is to explore the potential of new techniques (e.g., Massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output, millimeter waves, URLLC) for communication with UAVs. The new applications already have received some attention [3,5], however, they will require further analysis, simulations, and field measurements.…”

Deployment of an aerial platform system for rapid restoration of communications links after a disaster: a machine learning approach

“…Recommendations for future work includes an investigation of the impact of emergency traffic on the various communication interfaces at different altitudes [28,33]. A set of aerial platforms are considered in [34] for emergency communication using delay-tolerant networks (DTN) on sub-GHz frequencies.…”