Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as flying base stations (BSs) to offload Macro-BSs in hotspots. However, due to the limited battery on-board, UAVs can typically stay in operation for less than 1.5 hours. Afterward, the UAV has to fly back to a dedicated charging station that recharges/replaces the UAV's battery. In this paper, we study the performance of a UAV-enabled cellular network while capturing the influence of the spatial distribution of the charging stations. In particular, we use tools from stochastic geometry to derive the coverage probability of a UAV-enabled cellular network as a function of the battery size, the density of the charging stations, and the time required for recharging/replacing the battery.
Providing seamless connectivity to unmanned aerial vehicle user equipments (UAV-UEs) is very challenging due to the encountered line-of-sight interference and reduced gains of down-tilted base station (BS) antennas. For instance, as the altitude of UAV-UEs increases, their cell association and handover procedure become driven by the side-lobes of the BS antennas. In this paper, the performance of cellular-connected UAV-UEs is studied under 3D practical antenna configurations. Two scenarios are studied: scenarios with static, hovering UAV- UEs and scenarios with mobile UAV-UEs. For both scenari…
Airborne base stations (carried by drones) have a great potential to enhance coverage and capacity of cellular networks. Multiple scenarios and use cases will highly benefit from such technology such as (i) offloading terrestrial base stations (BSs) in dense and urban areas, and (ii) providing coverage for rural areas. However, one of the main challenges facing the deployment of airborne BSs is the limited available energy at the drone, which limits the flight time. In fact, most of the currently used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can only operate for one hour maximum. This limits the perfor…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become important in many applications including last-mile deliveries, surveillance and monitoring, and wireless networks. This paper aims to design UAV trajectories that simultaneously perform multiple tasks. We aim to design UAV trajectories that minimize package delivery time, and at the same time provide uniform coverage over a neighborhood area which is needed for applications such as network coverage or surveillance. We first consider multi-task UAVs for a simplified scenario where the neighborhood area is a circular region with the post office located…
With the advancement in drone technology, in just a few years, drones will be assisting humans in every domain. But there are many challenges to be tackled, communication being the chief one. This paper aims at providing insights into the latest UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) communication technologies through investigation of suitable task modules, antennas, resource handling platforms, and network architectures. Additionally, we explore techniques such as machine learning and path planning to enhance existing drone communication methods. Encryption and optimization techniques for ensuring lon…
System, design and methodology to load and dispense different articles from an autonomous aircraft are disclosed. In one embodiment, the design of a unique detachable dispenser for delivery of articles is described along with an intelligent methodology of loading and delivering the articles to and from the dispenser. Design of the dispenser, interaction of the dispenser with the flight control unit and ground control or base-station, and interaction of the base station with the sender or recipient of the article, are also described.
In this letter, we present a model for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including control, communication, and wireless charging. In so doing, we investigate associated energy and battery dynamics. Indeed, energy and battery expressions are derived by leveraging motors' and battery electrical models. Through an experiment, their performances are evaluated for different parameters. The objective is to provide a simple yet practical model of quadrotor UAV consumed/harvested energy and battery dynamics for researchers conducting work on energy-efficient aerial networks.
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Institute for Systems Research（系统研究所）
We explore an end-to-end (including access and backhaul links) UAV-assisted wireless communication system, considering both uplink and downlink traffics, with the goal of supporting demand of the Ground Users (GUs) using the minimum number of UAVs. Moreover, in order to extend the operational (flight) time of UAVs, we exploit an energy-aware routing scheme. Our intention is to design and analyze the access and backhaul connectivity of a drone-assisted communication network for remote and crowded areas and disaster relief, while minimizing the resources required i.e., the number of UAVs.
In this paper, we aim to sustain unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based missions for longer periods of times through different techniques. First, we consider on-the-mission UAV recharging by a low-power laser source (below 1 kilowatt). In order to achieve the maximal energy gain from the low-power laser source, we propose an operational compromise, which consists of the UAV resting over buildings with cleared line-of-sight to the laser source. Second, to provide a precise energy consumption/harvesting estimation at the UAV, we investigate the latter's dynamics in a mission environment. Indeed, we…
This work considers the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over a predefined area to serve a number of ground users. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the network,the UAVs may cause severe interference to the transmissions of each other. Hence, a judicious design of the user-UAV association and UAV locations is desired. A potential game is defined where the players are the UAVs. The potential function is the total sum-rate of the users. The agents utility in the potential games is their marginal contribution to the global welfare or their so-called wonderful life utility. A game-th…
In many emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the freshness of the is an important design criterion. Age of Information (AoI) quantifies the freshness of the received information or status update. This work considers a setup of deployed IoT devices in an IoT network; multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serve as mobile relay nodes between the sensors and the base station. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly plan the UAVs' trajectory, while minimizing the AoI of the received messages and the devices' energy consumption. The solution accounts for the UAVs' battery lifet…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many applications. The limited flight time of UAVs, however, still remains as a major challenge. Although numerous approaches have been developed to recharge the battery of UAVs effectively, little is known about optimal methodologies to deploy charging stations. In this paper, we address the charging station deployment problem with an aim to find the optimal number and locations of charging stations such that the system performance is maximized. We show that the problem is NP-Hard and propose UBAT, a heuristic framework based on the ant…
Next big commercial applications of drones require to fly the drone beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS). This inevitable ability to fly BVLOS will also necessitate the ability to keep track of the drone's location, in order to ensure successful completion of the intended service. In this context, we explore the fundamental limits of 3D localization of drones in conjunction with the effects of the 3D antenna radiation patterns. Although the localization of drone/unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a well-studied topic in the literature, its relationship to the antenna effects remains mostly un…
State-of-the-art drone technologies have severe flight time limitations due to weight constraints, which inevitably lead to a relatively small amount of available energy. Therefore, frequent battery replacement or recharging is necessary in applications such as delivery, exploration, or support to the wireless infrastructure. Mobile charging stations (i.e., mobile stations with charging equipment) for outdoor ad-hoc battery charging is one of the feasible solutions to address this issue. However, the ability of these platforms to charge the drones is limited in terms of the number and charging…
A Unified Framework for Joint Mobility Prediction and Object Profiling of Drones in UAV Networks
School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ（信息学、计算与网络系统学院，北亚利桑那大学，弗拉格斯塔，亚利桑那）；Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY（空军研究实验室，罗马，纽约）
As Covid-19 has increased the need for connectivity around the world, researchers are targeting new technologies that could improve coverage and connect the unconnected in order to make progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, drones are seen as one of the key features of 6G wireless networks that could extend the coverage of previous wireless network generations. That said, limited on-board energy seems to be the main drawback that hinders the use of drones for wireless coverage. Therefore, different wireless and wired charging techniques, such as las…
The applications of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increase rapidly in everyday life, thus detecting the UAVs and/or its pilot is a crucial task. Many UAVs adopt frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) technology to efficiently and securely communicate with their radio controllers (RC) where the signal follows a hopping pattern to prevent harmful interference. In order to realistically distinguish the frequency hopping (FH) RC signals, one should consider the real-world radio propagation environment since many UAVs communicate with RCs from a far distance in which signal faces both slow …
Localizing ground devices (GDs) is an important requirement for a wide variety of applications, such as infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, to name a few. To this end, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones offer a promising technology due to their flexibility. However, the distance measurements performed using a drone, an integral part of a localization procedure, incur several errors that affect the localization accuracy. In this paper, we provide analytical expressions for the impact of different kinds of measurement errors on the ground distan…
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Swisscom IoT/5G Innovation Lab（瑞士电信物联网/5G创新实验室）；Pompeu Fabra University (UPF)（庞培法布拉大学）
Besides being part of the Internet of Things (IoT), drones can play a relevant role in it as enablers. The 3D mobility of UAVs can be exploited to improve node localization in IoT networks for, e.g., search and rescue or goods localization and tracking. One of the widespread IoT communication technologies is Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), which allows achieving long communication distances with low power. In this work, we present a drone-aided localization system for LoRa networks in which a UAV is used to improve the estimation of a node's location initially provided by the network. …
Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；LORIA（洛林研究与信息学实验室）；Université de Rennes（雷恩大学）；IRISA（信息与自动化研究所（IRISA））；Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Department of Electrical, Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture（电气、电子与电信工程及船舶建筑系）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as drones, have raised increasing interest in recent years. Search and rescue scenarios where humans in emergency situations need to be quickly found in areas difficult to access constitute an important field of application for this technology. While research efforts have mostly focused on developing video-based solutions for this task \cite{lopez2017cvemergency}, UAV-embedded audio-based localization has received relatively less attention. Though, UAVs equipped with a microphone array could be of critical help to localize people in emergenc…
Drone-Based Antenna Measurement System with Optimized Positioning and ASPIRE-Based NF-FF Transformation
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度德里理工学院）；Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology Surat（萨达尔·瓦拉巴伊国家技术学院苏拉特分校）；Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦马尼帕尔理工学院）；Space Applications Centre (ISRO)（空间应用中心（印度空间研究组织））
We introduce the concept of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as drone base stations for in-band Integrated Access and Backhaul (IB-IAB) scenarios for 5G networks. We first present a system model for forward link transmissions in an IB-IAB multi-tier drone cellular network. We then investigate the key challenges of this scenario and propose a framework that utilizes the flying capabilities of the UAVs as the main degree of freedom to find the optimal precoder design for the backhaul links, user-base station association, UAV 3D hovering locations, and power allocations. We discuss how the p…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted considerable research interest recently. Especially when it comes to the realm of Internet of Things, the UAVs with Internet connectivity are one of the main demands. Furthermore, the energy constraint i.e. battery limit is a bottle-neck of the UAVs that can limit their applications. We try to address and solve the energy problem. Therefore, a path planning method for a cellular-connected UAV is proposed that will enable the UAV to plan its path in an area much larger than its battery range by getting recharged in certain positions equipped with p…
On-demand deployments of millimeter-wave (mmWave) access points (APs) carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are considered today as a potential solution to enhance the performance of 5G+ networks. The battery lifetime of modern UAVs, though, limits the flight times in such systems. In this letter, we evaluate a feasible deployment alternative for temporary capacity boost in the areas with highly fluctuating user demands. The approach is to land UAV-based mmWave APs on the nearby buildings instead of hovering over the area. Within the developed mathematical framework, we compare the system…
This paper investigates the control of a massive population of UAVs such as drones. The straightforward method of control of UAVs by considering the interactions among them to make a flock requires a huge inter-UAV communication which is impossible to implement in real-time applications. One method of control is to apply the mean-field game (MFG) framework which substantially reduces communications among the UAVs. However, to realize this framework, powerful processors are required to obtain the control laws at different UAVs. This requirement limits the usage of the MFG framework for real-tim…
