A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems

By Mohammad Mozaffari, Walid Saad, Medhi Bennis, Young-Han Nam, Merouane Debbah. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2018

2,422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The use of flying platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, is rapidly growing. In particular, with their inherent attributes such as mobility, flexibility, and adaptive altitude, UAVs admit several key potential applications in wireless systems. On the one hand, UAVs can be used as aerial base stations to enhance coverage, capacity, reliability, and energy efficiency of wireless networks. On the other hand, UAVs can operate as flying mobile terminals within a cellular network. Such cellular-connected UAVs can enable several applications ranging from real-time video streaming to item delivery. In this paper, a comprehensive tutorial on the potential benefits and applications of UAVs in wireless communications is presented. Moreover, the important challenges and the fundamental tradeoffs in UAV-enabled wireless networks are thoroughly investigated. In particular, the key UAV challenges such as 3D deployment, performance analysis, channel modeling, and energy efficiency are explored along with representative results. Then, open problems and potential research directions pertaining to UAV communications are introduced. Finally, various analytical frameworks and mathematical tools, such as optimization theory, machine learning, stochastic geometry, transport theory, and game theory are described. The use of such tools for addressing unique UAV problems is also presented. In a nutshell, this tutorial provides key guidelines on how to analyze, optimize, and design UAV-based wireless communication systems.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f5a0fbd07155cbf81ae9a5e76a1bc78da10a376

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “There have been numerous studies on this topic in the past few years, but most of them focus on UAV communication systems operating in the low frequency bands with omnidirectional antennas [9], [27], [30].”
Applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in road safety, traffic and highway infrastructure management: Recent advances and challenges (2020, background): “UAVs deployment, performance analysis, path planning, resource allocation, flight time optimization, energy efficiency are other key challenges that required more research efforts (Mozaffari et al., 2019).”
Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “Other surveys, tutorials, and short review articles with little relevance to this survey can be found in [5], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26],”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “The recent works [33] and [34] provide contemporary surveys of UAV applications in cellular networks, focusing on academic literatures and industry activities, respectively.”
Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing (2020, background): “In particular, reliable and cost-effective wireless communication solutions for multitudes of real-world scenarios can be offered by UAVs if properly deployed and operated [28].”
IRS-Assisted Secure UAV Transmission via Joint Trajectory and Beamforming Design (2022, background): “Compared to air-air wireless links, air-ground channels are more prone to blockages caused by obstacles and mountainous terrain, which restrains the performance of UAV systems [15].”
UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, neutral): “[18] • Air-to-Ground Channel modeling.”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, background): “It is worth noting that a number of papers in the literature provide overviews or surveys on UAV communication research [6], [8], [9], [16], [19], [54], [59]–[72].”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “The article [22] provides a detailed overview on the use of UAVs as BSs and UEs in wireless networks.”
Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities (2019, background): “The studies in [27] and [22] focused on the”
UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends (2019, background): “HAPs provide wider coverage and longer endurance [15].”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Smart Agriculture: Applications, Requirements, and Challenges (2020, background): “Gradually UAVs were successfully employed in several civil applications like agriculture, policing, surveillance, recreational purposes, etc [5].”
A Survey of Rate-Optimal Power Domain NOMA With Enabling Technologies of Future Wireless Networks (2019, methodology): “BSs for long term deployment, LAP flying UAV BSs for flexible short-term deployment, and some HAP UAV BSs for medium-term deployment as described in [132].”
A compilation of UAV applications for precision agriculture (2020, positive): “In particular, the maximum area that a single UAV can cover depends on its technical characteristics and payload [13] .”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “Some of the promising characteristics of UAV-enabled ABS based on [251], [276], [282] are as follows: • Intelligent 3D mobility and ease of maneuvering.”
UAV Trajectory Planning for Data Collection from Time-Constrained IoT Devices (2020, background): “Hence, major rethinking to the way current networks operate is underway [4] to accommodate the hyper connectivity expected in the realm of IoTs.”