Multi-Tier Drone Architecture for 5G/B5G Cellular Networks: Challenges, Trends, and Prospects

By Silvia Sekander, Hina Tabassum, Ekram Hossain. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2017

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles) are expected to be an important component of 5G/ beyond 5G (B5G) cellular architectures that can potentially facilitate wireless broadcast or point-to-multipoint transmissions. The distinct features of various drones such as the maximum operational altitude, communication, coverage, computation, and endurance impel the use of a multi-tier architecture for future dronecell networks. In this context, this article focuses on investigating the feasibility of multi-tier drone network architecture over traditional single-tier drone networks and identifying the scenarios in which drone networks can potentially complement the traditional RF-based terrestrial networks. We first identify the challenges associated with multi-tier drone networks as well as drone-assisted cellular networks. We then review the existing state-of-the-art innovations in drone networks and drone-assisted cellular networks. We then investigate the performance of a multi-tier drone network in terms of spectral efficiency of downlink transmission while illustrating the optimal intensity and altitude of drones in different tiers numerically. Our results demonstrate the specific network load conditions (i.e., ratio of user intensity and base station intensity) where deployment of drones can be beneficial (in terms of spectral efficiency of downlink transmission) for conventional terrestrial cellular networks.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61353583010aa862b10c69653d1a57824a7eabe5

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

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, background): “LAUs have a restricted capacity in terms of ﬂight autonomy ( i.e., up to 40 minutes of ﬂying time depending on the adopted battery technology), limited geographical area ( i.e., restricted mobility pattern), and low payload capacity ( i.e., up to 7 kilograms) [60].”
6G Wireless Communications: Vision and Potential Techniques (2019, background): “For example, in recent years, many different FBS projects have sprung up, such as the Google Loon project, the Facebook Aquila project, the ABSOLUTE project, and the Matternet project [6].”
Cellular-Enabled UAV Communication: A Connectivity-Constrained Trajectory Optimization Perspective (2018, background): “It is also worth noting that there is another line of work on the design and analysis of cellular networks with coexisting UAV-mounted BSs/relays and conventional GBSs [68]–[74], among which general overviews can be found in [68], [69].”
Energy Minimization for Wireless Communication With Rotary-Wing UAV (2018, background): “LAPs can be implemented in various ways, such as helikite [2] and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [3]–[7].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “In particular, the Flying Base Station (FBS) aided dynamic networks may be designed to boost the traditional static structure, as discussed in [111], the growing number and types of aerial vehicles, such as balloons, airships, and UAV.”
Survey on Network Slicing for Internet of Things Realization in 5G Networks (2021, background): “Application-speciﬁc optimisation of deployment, mobility and operations of drones [212] are an important research topic that can be tackled using network slicing.”
UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends (2019, background): “Furthermore, to support broadband wireless communications in a large geographical area, a swarm of UAVs forming FANETs [12], [13] and establishing connection links with the ground nodes, have been studied theoretically and validated through field experiments.”
Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2020, background): “To balance the tradeoff between path loss and LoS connectivity of UAVs during deployment in high and low altitudes, the authors in [44], [45] introduced a multi-tier UAV-assisted communication architecture.”
A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “[51] studied the challenges and advantages associated with a multi-tier drone network architecture.”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, unknown): “[25] S.”