A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence

By Qingqing Wu, Jie Xu, Yong Zeng, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Naofal Al-Dhahir, Robert Schober, A. L. Swindlehurst. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2020

509 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight important directions for further investigation in future work.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cab246f2b2eaba4ed45751c7da6c6e98e9a5b3b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. M. Di Renzo
2. Rui Zhang
3. Jie Xu
4. Qingqing Wu
5. Zhonghao Lyu
6. Guangxu Zhu
7. Wen Chen
8. Kaitao Meng

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. M. Di Renzo
3. Jie Xu
4. Qingqing Wu
5. Guangxu Zhu
6. Angel E. Lozano
7. Zhonghao Lyu
8. Marco Mezzavilla

Citations in the corpus

• What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “UAV integration into 5G and beyond is also discussed in [23], [24],”
• Joint Maneuver and Beamforming Design for UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, methodology): “Driven by the recent development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless communications [19], we expect that UAVs can also be utilized as a new type of aerial ISAC platforms to relieve the above limitations, especially for emergence scenarios after disasters or at temporary hot-spot areas ”
• Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication (2022, background): “Moreover, forcing both functionalities to work simultaneously will also inevitably cause higher energy consumption, which is unfavorable for the equipment with insufficient energy (e.g., power limited UAVs [36]).”
• Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “The authors in [11], [12] reviewed UAVs related communications”
• A Survey on the Convergence of Edge Computing and AI for UAVs: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, background): “According to Wu et al. [35], in the case of UAVs, the server where local model updates are sent can either be a ground BS or another UAV in the sky.”
• Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, background): “…autonomous systems [16], autonomous driving [17], human activity sensing [18], as well as smart home and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks [19], [20] that rely on sensing functionalities, such as wireless localization in support of compelling services [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26],…”