Autonomy of devices is a major challenge in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, in particular when the nodes are deployed remotely or difficult to assess places. In this paper we present an approach to provide energy to these devices by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Therefore, the two major challenges, finding and charging the node are presented. We propose a model to give the energy constrained node an unlimited autonomy by taken the Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) link and battery capacity into account. Selecting the most suitable battery technology allows a reduction in battery capacity and waste. Moreover, an upgrade of existing IoT nodes is feasible with a limited impact on the design and form factor.
With the explosive increment of computation requirements, the multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm appears as an effective mechanism. Besides, as for the Internet of Things (IoT) in disasters or remote areas requiring MEC services, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and high altitude platforms (HAPs) are available to provide aerial computing services for these IoT devices. In this paper, we develop the hierarchical aerial computing framework composed of HAPs and UAVs, to provide MEC services for various IoT applications. In particular, the problem is formulated to maximize the total IoT dat…
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 …
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…
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 the next few years, smart farming will reach each and every nook of the world. The prospects of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for smart farming are immense. However, the cost and the ease in controlling UAVs for smart farming might play an important role for motivating farmers to use UAVs in farming. Mostly, UAVs are controlled by remote controllers using radio waves. There are several technologies such as WiFi or ZigBee that are also used for controlling UAVs. However, Smart Bluetooth (also referred to as Bluetooth Low Energy) is a wireless technology used to transfer data over shor…
Connectivity-Aware UAV Path Planning with Aerial Coverage Maps
Department of ECE, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong（香港科技大学电子工程系）；Department of EIE, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong（香港理工大学电子工程系）
In this paper, we consider the use of UAVs to provide wireless connectivity services, for example after failures of wireless network components or to simply provide additional bandwidth on demand, and introduce the concept of UAVs as a service (UaaS). To facilitate UaaS, we introduce a novel framework, dubbed D3S, which consists of four phases: demand, decision, deployment, and service. The main objective of this framework is to develop efficient and realistic solutions to implement these four phases. The technical problems include determining the type and number of UAVs to be deployed, and al…
Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising solution to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity and extend coverage. In recent years, the area of wireless communications for UAV system design and optimization has been receiving enormous attention from the research community. However, there are still existing challenges that are far from solved. To cope with those challenges, researchers have been exploring the applicability of game-theoretic approaches. This paper surveys the existing game-theoretic solutions and presents a number of novel solutions whic…
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…
Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enhance network coverage has proven a variety of benefits compared to terrestrial counterparts. One of the commonly used mathematical tools to model the locations of the UAVs is stochastic geometry (SG). However, in the existing studies, both users and UAVs are often modeled as homogeneous point processes. In this paper, we consider an inhomogeneous Poisson point process (PPP)-based model for the locations of the users that captures the degradation in the density of active users as we move away from the town center. In addition, we propose the deploymen…
Aerial networks, composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) acting as Wi-Fi access points or cellular base stations, are emerging as an interesting solution to provide on-demand wireless connectivity to users, when there is no network infrastructure available, or to enhance the network capacity. This article proposes a traffic-aware topology control solution for aerial networks that holistically combines the placement of UAVs with a predictive and centralized routing protocol. The synergy created by the combination of the UAV placement and routing solutions allows the aerial network to seamle…
Cellular network-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) experience different radio propagation conditions than radio nodes on the ground. Therefore, it has become critical to investigate the performance of aerial radios, both theoretically and through field trials. In this paper, we consider low-altitude aerial nodes that are served by an experimental cellular network. We provide a detailed description of the hardware and software components needed for establishing a broadband wireless testbed for UAV communications research using software radios. Results show that a testbed for innovation …
Several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) collision avoidance problem. Most of these solutions consider that the ground controller system (GCS) determines the path of a UAV before starting a particular mission at hand. Furthermore, these solutions expect the occurrence of collisions based only on the GPS localization of UAVs as well as via object-detecting sensors placed on board UAVs. The sensors' sensitivity to environmental disturbances and the UAVs' influence on their accuracy impact negatively the efficiency of these solutions. I…
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…
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…
As an emerging field of aerial robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant research interest within the wireless networking research community. As soon as national legislations allow UAVs to fly autonomously, we will see swarms of UAV populating the sky of our smart cities to accomplish different missions: parcel delivery, infrastructure monitoring, event filming, surveillance, tracking, etc. The UAV ecosystem can benefit from existing 5G/B5G cellular networks, which can be exploited in different ways to enhance UAV communications. Because of the inherent characteristics …
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being utilized for a wide spectrum of applications in wireless networks leading to attractive business opportunities. In the case of abrupt disruption to existing cellular network operation or infrastructure, e.g., due to an unexpected surge in user demand or a natural disaster, UAVs can be deployed to provide instant recovery via temporary wireless coverage in designated areas. A major challenge is to determine efficiently how many UAVs are needed and where to position them in a relatively large 3D search space. To this end, we formulate the problem of 3D d…
Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as user equipment (UE) and base-stations (BSs) into an existing LTE-Advanced heterogeneous network (HetNet) can further enhance wireless connectivity and support emerging services. However, this would require effective configuration of system-level design parameters for interference management. This paper provides system-level insights into a three-tier LTEAdvanced air/ground HetNet, wherein the UAVs are deployed both as BSs and UEs, and co-exist with existing terrestrial nodes. Moreover, this HetNet leverages on cell range expansion (CRE), intercell…
This paper studies the problem of spectrum shortage in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network during critical missions such as wildfire monitoring, search and rescue, and disaster monitoring. Such applications involve a high demand for high-throughput data transmissions such as real-time video-, image-, and voice- streaming where the assigned spectrum to the UAV network may not be adequate to provide the desired Quality of Service (QoS). In these scenarios, the aerial network can borrow an additional spectrum from the available terrestrial networks in the trade of a relaying service for them…
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…
Cooperating small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will open up new application fields within next-generation Intelligent Transportation Sytems (ITSs), e.g., airborne near field delivery. In order to allow the exploitation of the potentials of hybrid vehicular scenarios, reliable and efficient bidirectional communication has to be guaranteed in highly dynamic environments. For addressing these novel challenges, we present a lightweight framework for integrated simulation of aerial and ground-based vehicular networks. Mobility and communication are natively brought together using a shared …
In this paper, we propose a novel joint intelligent trajectory design and resource allocation algorithm based on user's mobility and their requested services for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted networks, where UAVs act as nodes of a network function virtualization (NFV) enabled network. Our objective is to maximize energy efficiency and minimize the average delay on all services by allocating the limited radio and NFV resources. In addition, due to the traffic conditions and mobility of users, we let some Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to migrate from their current locations to othe…
Are 5G connection and UAVs merely parts of an extravagant and luxurious world, or are they essential parts of a practical world in a way we have yet to see? To aid in a direction to address the issue, we provide a practical framework for immersive aerial monitoring for public safety. Because the framework is built on top of actual realizations and implementations designed to fulfill specific use cases, high level of practicality is ensured by nature. We first investigate 5G network performance on UAVs by isolating performance for different aspects of expected flight missions. Finally, the nove…
The growing use of aerial user equipments (UEs) in various applications requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity for safe control and data exchange between these devices and ground stations. Key questions that need to be addressed when planning the deployment of aerial UEs are whether the cellular network is a suitable candidate for enabling such connectivity, and how the inclusion of aerial UEs might impact the overall network efficiency. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of user and network level performance of a cellular network that serves both unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a…
In this letter, the localization of terrestrial nodes when unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used as base stations is investigated. Particularly, a novel localization scenario based on received signal strength (RSS) from terrestrial nodes is introduced. In contrast to the existing literature, our analysis includes height-dependent path loss exponent and shadowing which results in an optimum UAV altitude for minimum localization error. Furthermore, the Cramer-Rao lower bound is derived for the estimated distance which emphasizes, analytically, the existence of an optimal UAV altitude. Our sim…
This paper studies how to achieve a high and flexible coverage performance of a large-scale cellular network that enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission to simultaneously serve multiple users. The considered cellular network consists of a tier of base stations and a tier of UAVs. Each UAV is mounted with an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in order to serve as an aerial IRS reflecting signals between a base station and a user in the network. All the UAVs in the network are deployed based on a newly proposed three-dimensional (3D) poin…
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, an…
