Designing and implementing future aerial communication networks

By S. Chandrasekharan, K. Gomez, Akram Al-Hourani, Kandeepan Sithamparanathan, T. Rasheed, L. Goratti, L. Reynaud, D. Grace, I. Bucaille, T. Wirth and 1 more. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2016

373 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Providing "connectivity from the sky" is the new innovative trend in wireless communications. High and low altitude platforms, drones, aircrafts, and airships are being considered as candidates for deploying wireless communications complementing the terrestrial communication infrastructure. In this article we report the detailed account of the design and implementation challenges of an aerial network consisting of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) base stations. In particular, we review achievements and innovations harnessed by an aerial network composed of Helikite platforms. Helikites can be raised in the sky to bring Internet access during special events and in the aftermath of an emergency. The trial phase of the system mounting LTE-A technology onboard Helikites to serve users on the ground yielded very encouraging results, and showed that such a system could offer a longer lasting solution, provided that inefficiency in powering the radio frequency equipment in the Helikite can be overcome.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a3852e57340fb287658df61467366ecf811b70d

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In Aerospace Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Yong Zeng
3. Qingqing Wu
4. Merouane Debbah
5. Walid Saad
6. Medhi Bennis
7. Mohammad Mozaffari
8. Jie Xu

Citations in the corpus

• Blockchain for 5G-enabled IoT for industrial automation: A systematic review, solutions, and challenges (2020, background): “The images obtained from UAVs can provide support in various industrial applications such as-urban modelling, surveillance, large scale mapping, delivery, communications and media, search-and-rescue operations, and agriculture [96].”
• Trajectory Design for Completion Time Minimization in UAV-Enabled Multicasting (2018, background): “2790401 this issue, there have been growing interests in providing wireless connectivity from the sky, by utilizing various airborne platforms such as balloons [2], helikites [3], and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [4], [5].”
• Distributed Drone Base Station Positioning for Emergency Cellular Networks Using Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “Despite some works covering the deployment of drones in emergency situations [1, 8], other works covering the deployment of drones with backhaul limitations [11, 13, 15], and others considering the positioning of aerial platforms [3, 5–7, 9–11, 14], only [3] proposes an intelligent solution in…”
• UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, neutral): “Cell 2”
• Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey (2018, background): “UAVs, airships and balloons are the main infrastructures making up the high and low altitude platforms (HAPs & LAPs) which can provide broadband wireless communications complementing the terrestrial networks [22].”
• A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “These exciting new opportunities for using various types of UAVs for wireless networking purposes have spawned numerous recent research activities in the area [7]–[15], [33]–[43].”
• A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, background): “ABSOLUTE 2017 Leverage aerial BSs along with terrestrial and satellite communications to enhance the ground network capacity, especially for public safety in emergency situations [39], [40].”
• Wireless Communication Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Optimal Transport Theory for Hover Time Optimization (2017, background): “For wireless backhauling of aerial networks, satellite and WiFi are considered as the two feasible candidates [21].”
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, neutral): “Such as Viking aircraft [33]–[35], Tethered Helikite Balloon [30] and the FALCON Quadrotor [32].”
• Downlink Coverage Analysis for a Finite 3-D Wireless Network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2017, neutral): “2722500 equipment and/or loss of power [2]–[4].”
• The New Frontier in RAN Heterogeneity: Multi-Tier Drone-Cells (2016, background): “For instance, a preliminary implementation of an LTE eNodeB-based drone operation is presented in [4], where a remote radio head (RRH) is deployed on an off-the-shelf helikite.”
• Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey (2018, background): “By comparison, low-altitude platforms, such as fixed-wing drones, rotorcrafts or kite-balloons, provide advantages of rapid deployment and low cost and are most suited for temporary events [43].”
• 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].”
• The Sky Is Not the Limit: LTE for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2017, neutral): “operations, agriculture, wildlife conservation, among others [2].”