Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond

By Yong Zeng, Qingqing Wu, Rui Zhang. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2019

1,421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found numerous applications and are expected to bring fertile business opportunities in the next decade. Among various enabling technologies for UAVs, wireless communication is essential and has drawn significantly growing attention in recent years. Compared to the conventional terrestrial communications, UAVs’ communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement in the 3-D space. Several critical issues arise, including the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels and induced strong aerial-terrestrial network interference, the distinct communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for UAV control messages versus payload data, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the exploitation of the new design degree of freedom (DoF) brought by the highly controllable 3-D UAV mobility. In this article, we give a tutorial overview of the recent advances in UAV communications to address the above issues, with an emphasis on how to integrate UAVs into the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) and future cellular networks. In particular, we partition our discussion into two promising research and application frameworks of UAV communications, namely UAV-assisted wireless communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into the network as new aerial communication platforms and users, respectively. Furthermore, we point out promising directions for future research.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/793c2fae0c3d0b8c1084e0c9e10e76cea6632b79

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Citations in the corpus

Edge Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Applications (2021, background): “…space information platform across the satellite networks (e.g., miniaturized satellites [211]), aerial networks (e.g., UAV communications [212]), and terrestrial communications (e.g., vehicular communications [213]) to provide ubiquitous connectivity for various edge training…”
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A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, positive): “4) More diversified high-quality positioning methods: Compared with today’s cellular networks, the location information of UEs, reflectors, and obstacles will not only be more readily obtainable in 6G, but also with much higher quality, e.g., in terms of accuracy and location updating rate.”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, methodology): “The tutorials [11]–[13] review several UAV applications and their corresponding communication designs, including the UAV placement and trajectory optimization.”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, methodology): “Although prior works assumed probabilistic LoS channel models and accordingly used average channel power gains in their problem formulations [8], such designs would lead to highly compromised solutions.”
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Waveform Design and Performance Analysis for Full-Duplex Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, background): “One typical application scenario is unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm operation [40], where the FD-ISAC node corresponds to a UAV cluster head and the collocated communication receiver/sensing target corresponds to the UAV follower.”
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Smart Agriculture: Applications, Requirements, and Challenges (2020, background): “Wireless networking technologies such as 5G and software-deﬁned networking can signiﬁcantly improve the overall scenario in terms of routing and strong internet connection [45], [46].”
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A Vision and Framework for the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) Networks of the Future (2020, background): “3 Among them, [27] provided a comprehensive tutorial of the subject, reviewed recent developments, and highlighted important open issues.”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, background): “c) Drone monitoring and management: In recent years, enthusiasm for the use of UAVs in civilian and commercial applications has skyrocketed [62].”