The recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have further extended Internet of Things (IoT) from the sole "things" aspect to the omnipotent role of "intelligent connection of things". Meanwhile, the concept of internet of everything (IoE) is presented as such an omnipotent extension of IoT. However, the IoE realization meets critical challenges including the restricted network coverage and the limited resource of existing network technologies. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant attentions attributed to their high mobility, low cost, and flexible deployment. Thus, UAVs may potentially overcome the challenges of IoE. This article presents a comprehensive survey on opportunities and challenges of UAV-enabled IoE. We first present three critical expectations of IoE: 1) scalability requiring a scalable network architecture with ubiquitous coverage, 2) intelligence requiring a global computing plane enabling intelligent things, 3) diversity requiring provisions of diverse applications. Thereafter, we review the enabling technologies to achieve these expectations and discuss four intrinsic constraints of IoE (i.e., coverage constraint, battery constraint, computing constraint, and security issues). We then present an overview of UAVs. We next discuss the opportunities brought by UAV to IoE. Additionally, we introduce a UAV-enabled IoE (Ue-IoE) solution by exploiting UAVs's mobility, in which we show that Ue-IoE can greatly enhance the scalability, intelligence and diversity of IoE. Finally, we outline the future directions in Ue-IoE.
As new use cases are emerging for unmanned aerial systems (UAS), advanced wireless communications technologies and systems need to be implemented and widely tested. This requires a flexible platform for development, deployment, testing and demonstration of wireless systems with ground and aerial nodes, enabling effective 3D mobile communications and networking. In this paper, we provide a comparative overview of software-defined radios (SDRs), with a specific focus on SDR hardware and software that can be used for aerial wireless experimentation and research. We discuss SDR hardware requiremen…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm enabled edge computing is envisioned to be promising in the sixth generation wireless communication networks due to their wide application sensories and flexible deployment. However, most of the existing works focus on edge computing enabled by a single or a small scale UAVs, which are very different from UAV swarm-enabled edge computing. In order to facilitate the practical applications of UAV swarm-enabled edge computing, the state of the art research is presented in this article. The potential applications, architectures and implementation considerations …
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have drastically gained popularity in various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. In this context, the combination of ground vehicles, such as delivery trucks, with drones to assist in the last mile pick-up and delivery of the parcels has been recently proposed. While aerial vehicles promise increased efficiency based on flexible routes and parallelized operation, highly reliable wireless communication is also required for the control and coordination of potentially many drones acti…
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States is considering Remote ID systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These systems act as license plates used on automobiles, but they transmit information using radio waves. To be useful, the transmissions in such systems need to reach long distances to minimize the number of ground stations to capture these transmissions. LoRaWAN is designed as a cheap long-range technology to be used for long-range communication for the Internet of Things. Several manufacturers make LoRaWAN modules, which are readily available on the market and are…
In this paper, we consider an Internet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over cellular networks, where UAVs work as aerial users to collect various sensory data, and send the collected data to their transmission destinations over cellular links. Unlike the terrestrial users in the conventional cellular networks, different UAVs have various communication requirements due to their sensing applications, and a more flexible communication framework is in demand. To tackle this problem, we propose a UAV-to-Everything (U2X) networking, which enables the UAVs to adjust their communication modes full …
The application domains of civilian unmanned aerial systems (UASs) include agriculture, exploration, transportation, and entertainment. The expected growth of the UAS industry brings along new challenges: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight control signaling requires low throughput, but extremely high reliability, whereas the data rate for payload data can be significant. This paper develops UAV number projections and concludes that small and micro UAVs will dominate the US airspace with accelerated growth between 2028 and 2032. We analyze the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)…
Nanchang Institute of Technology（南昌工程学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
The challenge of dynamic traffic demand in mobile networks is tackled by moving cells based on unmanned aerial vehicles. Considering the tremendous potential of unmanned aerial vehicles in the future, we propose a new heuristic algorithm for coverage optimization. The proposed algorithm is implemented based on a conditional generative adversarial neural network, with a unique multilayer sum-pooling loss function. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, we compare it with the optimal core-set algorithm and quasi-optimal spiral algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed app…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more common, and their operational range is expanding tremendously, making the security aspect of the inquiry essential. This study does a thorough assessment of the literature to determine the most common cyberattacks and the effects they have on UAV assaults on civilian targets. The STRIDE assault paradigm, the challenge they present, and the proper tools for the attack are used to categorize the cyber dangers discussed in this paper. Spoofing and denial of service assaults are the most prevalent types of UAV cyberattacks and have the best results…
Many use cases of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) require beyond visual line-of-sight (LOS) communications. Mobile networks offer wide area, high speed, and secure wireless connectivity, which can enhance control and safety of UAV operations and enable beyond visual LOS use cases. In this article, we share some of our experience in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) connectivity for low altitude small UAVs. We first identify the typical airborne connectivity requirements and characteristics, highlight the different propagation conditions for UAVs and mobiles on the ground with measurement and ray traci…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are a promising technology for fast, large scale survey operations such as maritime search and rescue (SAR). However, providing reliable communications over long distances remains a challenge. Cellular technology such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) is designed to perform well in the presence of fast-moving clients and highly dynamic channel conditions. Yet, its generic medium access mechanisms make it hard to support low-latency uplink traffic, which is needed for real-time command and control and similar applications. In this paper, we introduce an unmanned aerial…
Beyond visual line-of-sight connectivity is key for use cases of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and rescue missions. Cellular networks stand ready to support flying UAVs by providing wide-area, quality, and secure connectivity for UAV operations. Ensuring reliable connections in the presence of UAV movements is important for safety control and operations of UAVs. With increasing height above the ground, the radio environment changes. Using terrestrial cellular networks to provide connectivity to the UAVs moving in the sky may face new chall…
High-speed railway is playing an important role in mass transportation, due to its lower energy consumption, less environmental pollution, larger capacity and higher safety features. The development of high-speed railway makes people's life more and more convenient. Meanwhile, providing high quality of service broadband communications for fast-moving users still remains unsolved, despite the fact that new solutions of incremental improvements are keeping up with this unprecedented communication requirement growth. This article proposes a communication system infrastructure based on airborne re…
This paper evaluates the feasibility of using light fidelity with multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for indoor collaborative and cooperative networking. A number of works have presentedchallenges for wireless networking with multiple UAVs such as bandwidth efficiency, security and environment amongst others. Due to this fact, there is a need to secure information and data in UAV ad hoc network (FANETs) using a secure transmission medium that guarantees bandwidth efficiency such as the light fidelity (Li-Fi). Li-Fi enables data transmission using visible light through a light emitting di…
Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also intr…
Cellular-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are a promising paradigm to provide reliable and fast Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS) communication services for UAV operations. However, such systems are facing a serious GPS spoofing threat for UAV's position. To enable safe and secure UAV navigation BVLoS, this paper proposes a cellular network assisted UAV position monitoring and anti-GPS spoofing system, where deep learning approach is used to live detect spoofed GPS positions. Specifically, the proposed system introduces a MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) model which is trained on the s…
In this paper, we provide a performance analysis for practical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled networks. By considering both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) transmissions between aerial base stations (BSs) and ground users, the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency (ASE) are derived. Considering that there is no consensus on the path loss model for studying UAVs in the literature, in this paper, three path loss models, i.e., high-altitude model, low-altitude model and ultra-low-altitude model, are investigated and compared. Moreover, the lower bound of th…
As an autonomous vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are subjected to several challenges. One of the challenges is for UAV to be able to avoid collision. Many collision avoidance methods have been proposed to address this issue. Furthermore, in a multi-UAV system, it is also important to address communication issue among UAVs for cooperation and collaboration. This issue can be addressed by setting up an ad-hoc network among UAVs. There is also a need to consider the challenges in the deployment of UAVs, as well as, in the development of collision avoidance methods and the establishment …
