UAV-aided RF Mapping for Sensing and Connectivity in Wireless Networks
EURECOM（欧洲通信学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Future Network of Intelligence Institute（未来智联网络研究院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
David Gesbert, Omid Esrafilian, Junting Chen, Rajeev Gangula, Urbashi Mitra
备注：
Accepted for publication in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as flying radio access network (RAN) nodes offers a promising complement to traditional fixed terrestrial deployments. More recently yet still in the context of wireless networks, drones have also been envisioned for use as radio frequency (RF) sensing and localization devices. In both cases, the advantage of using UAVs lies in their ability to navigate themselves freely in 3D and in a timely manner to locations of space where the obtained network throughput or sensing performance is optimal. In practice, the selection of a proper location or trajectory for the UAV very much depends on local terrain features, including the position of surrounding radio obstacles. Hence, the robot must be able to map the features of its radio environment as it performs its data communication or sensing services. The challenges related to this task, referred here as radio mapping, are discussed in this paper. Its promises related to efficient trajectory design for autonomous radio-aware UAVs are highlighted, along with algorithm solutions. The advantages induced by radio-mapping in terms of connectivity, sensing, and localization performance are illustrated.
In this letter, we study the secure communication problem in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled networks aided by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) from the physical-layer security perspective. Specifically, the IRS is deployed to assist the wireless transmission from the UAV to the ground user in the presence of an eavesdropper. The objective of this work is to maximize the secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the phase shifts at the IRS as well as the transmit power and location of the UAV. However, the formulated problem is difficult to solve directly due to the non-linear and no…
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This paper studies unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided wireless communication systems where a UAV supports uplink communications of multiple ground nodes (GNs) while flying over the area of the interest. In this system, the propulsion energy consumption at the UAV is taken into account so that the UAV's velocity and acceleration should not exceed a certain threshold. We formulate the minimum average rate maximization problem and the energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by jointly optimizing the trajectory, velocity, and acceleration of the UAV and the uplink transmit power at the GNs. A…
EURECOM（欧洲通信学院）；Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe（三菱电机欧洲研发中心）
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GPS-Aided Deep Learning for Beam Prediction and Tracking in UAV mmWave Communication
Department of Intelligent Mechatronics Engineering, and Department of Convergence Engineering for Intelligent Drone, Sejong University（智能机电工程系，智能无人机融合工程系，世宗大学）
For unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided millimeter wave (mmWave) networks, we propose a unified three-dimensional (3D) spatial framework in this paper to model a general case that uncovered users send messages to base stations via UAVs. More specifically, the locations of transceivers in downlink and uplink are modeled through the Poisson point processes and Poisson cluster processes (PCPs), respectively. For PCPs, Matern cluster and Thomas cluster processes, are analyzed. Furthermore, both 3D blockage processes and 3D antenna patterns are introduced for appraising the effect of altitudes. Bas…
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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized as aerial base stations to provide communication service for remote mobile users due to their high mobility and flexible deployment. However, the line-of-sight (LoS) wireless links are vulnerable to be intercepted by the eavesdropper (Eve), which presents a major challenge for UAV-aided communications. In this paper, we propose a latency-minimized transmission scheme for satisfying legitimate users' (LUs') content requests securely against Eve. By leveraging physical-layer security (PLS) techniques, we formulate a transmission latency minimizatio…
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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an integral part of wireless networks, and determining collision-free trajectories for multiple UAVs while satisfying requirements of connectivity with ground base stations (GBSs) is a challenging task. In this paper, we first reformulate the multi-UAV trajectory optimization problem with collision avoidance and wireless connectivity constraints as a sequential decision making problem in the discrete time domain. We, then, propose a decentralized deep reinforcement learning approach to solve the problem. More specifically, a value network is d…
In conventional terrestrial cellular networks, mobile terminals (MTs) at the cell edge often pose a performance bottleneck due to their long distances from the serving ground base station (GBS), especially in hotspot period when the GBS is heavily loaded. This paper proposes a new hybrid network architecture by leveraging the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an aerial mobile base station, which flies cyclically along the cell edge to offload data traffic for cell-edge MTs. We aim to maximize the minimum throughput of all MTs by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, bandwidth allocati…
Ericsson Research（爱立信研究院）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will inevitably be integrated into future cellular networks as new aerial mobile users. Providing cellular connectivity to UAVs will enable a myriad of applications ranging from online video streaming to medical delivery. However, to enable a reliable wireless connectivity for the UAVs as well as a secure operation, various challenges need to be addressed such as interference management, mobility management and handover, cyber-physical attacks, and authentication. In this paper, the goal is to expose the wireless and security challenges that a…
We consider a scenario where an UAV-mounted flying base station is providing data communication services to a number of radio nodes spread over the ground. We focus on the problem of resource-constrained UAV trajectory design with (i) optimal channel parameters learning and (ii) optimal data throughput as key objectives, respectively. While the problem of throughput optimized trajectories has been addressed in prior works, the formulation of an optimized trajectory to efficiently discover the propagation parameters has not yet been addressed. When it comes to the communication phase, the advan…
An urban tactical wireless network is considered wherein the base stations are situated on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that provide connectivity to ground assets such as vehicles located on city streets. The UAVs are assumed to be randomly deployed at a fixed height according to a two-dimensional point process. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies are used to avail of large available bandwidths and spatial isolation due to beamforming. In urban environments, mmWave signals are prone to blocking of the line-of-sight (LoS) by buildings. While reflections are possible, the desire for consiste…
Joint 3D Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for Secure Dual-UAV-aided Underlay Systems
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
To deal with the explosive growth of mobile traffic, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications with abundant bandwidth resources have been applied to vehicular networks. As mmWave signal is sensitive to blockage, we introduce the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided two-way relaying system for vehicular connection enhancement and coverage expansion. How to improve transmission efficiency and to reduce latency time in such a dynamic scenario is a challenging problem. In this paper, we formulate the joint optimization problem of relay selection and transmission scheduling, aiming to reduce transmis…
Mobile relaying is emerged as a promising technique to assist wireless communication, driven by the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we study secure transmission in a four-node (source, destination, mobile relay, and eavesdropper) system, wherein we focus on maximizing the secrecy rate via jointly optimizing the relay trajectory and the source/relay transmit power. Nevertheless, due to the coupling of the trajectory designing and the power allocating, the secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is intractable to solve. Accordingly, we propose an alternating …
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted a lot of research attention because of their high mobility and low cost in serving as temporary aerial base stations (BSs) and providing high data rates for next-generation communication networks. To protect user privacy while avoiding detection by a warden, we investigate a jammer-aided UAV covert communication system, which aims to maximize the user's covert rate with optimized transmit and jamming power. The UAV is equipped with multi-antennas to serve multi-users simultaneously and enhance the Quality of Service. By considering the general com…
Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Networks is a promising solution to providing wireless coverage to ground users in challenging rural areas (such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices in farmlands), where the traditional cellular networks are sparse or unavailable. A key challenge in such networks is the 3D placement of all UAV base stations such that the formed Multi-UAV Network (i) utilizes a minimum number of UAVs while ensuring -- (ii) backhaul connectivity directly (or via other UAVs) to the nearby terrestrial base station, and (iii) wireless coverage to all ground users in the area of o…
Recently, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on telecommunication for remote working and telemedicine has significantly increased. In cellular networks, incorporation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can result in enhanced connectivity for outdoor users due to the high probability of establishing Line of Sight (LoS) links. The UAV's limited battery life and its signal attenuation in indoor areas, however, make it inefficient to manage users' requests in indoor environments. Referred to as the Cluster centric and Coded UAV-aided Femtocaching (CCUF) framework, the network's …
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with a fixed-wing UAV dispatched to collect data from marine buoys. We aim to minimize the UAV's energy consumption in completing the task by jointly optimizing the communication time scheduling among the buoys and the UAV's flight trajectory subject to wind effect. The conventional successive convex approximation (SCA) method can provide efficient sub-optimal solutions for collecting s…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with a fixed-wing UAV dispatched to collect data from marine buoys. We aim to minimize the UAV's energy consumption in completing the task by jointly optimizing the communication time scheduling among the buoys and the UAV's flight trajectory subject to wind effect, which is a non-convex problem and difficult to solve optimally. Existing techniques such as the successive convex approxim…
In this work, we explore the potential benefits of deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (ABSs) with sub-6GHz band and small cells terrestrial base stations (TBSs) with millimeter wave (mmWave) band in a hybrid heterogeneous networks (HetNets). A flexible non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based user association policy is proposed. By using the tools from stochastic geometry, new analytical expressions for association probability, coverage probability and spectrum efficiency are derived for characterizing the performance of UAV-aided HetNets under the realistic A…
In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, directional modulation (DM) is adopted to improve the secrecy rate (SR) performance. Alice, a ground base station, behaves as a control center, and Bob is a UAV of flying along a linear flight trajectory who optimizes its SR performance by dynamically adjusting its beamforming vectors and power allocation (PA) strategy. Per fixed time interval during the Bob's flight process, the transmit beamforming vectors for useful messages and AN projection are given by the rule of maximizing signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (Max-SLNR) and maximizing AN-and-leak…
The Cooperative Rate-Splitting (CRS) scheme, proposed evolves from conventional Rate Splitting (RS) and relies on forwarding a portion of the RS message by the relaying users. In terms of secrecy enhancement, it has been shown that CRS outperforms its non-cooperative counterpart for a two-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC). Given the massive connectivity requirement of 6G, we have generalized the existing secure two-user CRS framework to the multi-user framework, where the highest-security users must be selected as the relay nodes. This paper addresses the problem …
The enabling of safe cellular controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) beyond visual line of sight is expected to open important future opportunities in the area of transportation, goods delivery, and system monitoring. A key challenge in this area lies in the design of trajectories which, while allowing the completion of the UAV mission, can guarantee reliable cellular connectivity all along the path. Previous approaches in this domain have considered simplistic propagation model assumptions (e.g. Line of Sight based) or more advanced models but with computationally demanding optimized soluti…
