What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G

By Giovanni Geraci, Adrián García‐Rodríguez, Mohammad Mahdi Azari, Angel E. Lozano, Marco Mezzavilla, Symeon Chatzinotas, Yun Chen, Sundeep Rangan, M. Di Renzo. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2021

474 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What will the future of UAV cellular communications be? In this tutorial article, we address such a compelling yet difficult question by embarking on a journey from 5G to 6G and expounding a large number of case studies supported by original results. We start by overviewing the status quo on UAV communications from an industrial standpoint, providing fresh updates from the 3GPP and detailing new 5G NR features in support of aerial devices. We then dissect the potential and the limitations of such features. In particular, we demonstrate how sub-6GHz massive MIMO can successfully tackle cell selection and interference challenges, we showcase encouraging mmWave coverage evaluations in both urban and suburban/rural settings, and we examine the peculiarities of direct device-to-device communications in the sky. Moving on, we sneak a peek at next-generation UAV communications, listing some of the use cases envisioned for the 2030s. We identify the most promising 6G enablers for UAV communication, those expected to take the performance and reliability to the next level. For each of these disruptive new paradigms (non-terrestrial networks, cell-free architectures, artificial intelligence, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and THz communications), we gauge the prospective benefits for UAVs and discuss the main technological hurdles that stand in the way. All along, we distil our numerous findings into essential takeaways, and we identify key open problems worthy of further study.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/816b553f18eb4166838ba15f0c6e799edf336385

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Citations in the corpus

Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Toward 6G (2021, background): “Furthermore, increased use of UAVs in novel commercial applications is currently being enabled by recent advances in the design of cost-effective drone technology [365, 366].”
Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “For instance, the tutorial paper [6] focused on UAV cellular communi-”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “[10] ∂ μ ∂ μ Comprehensive overview on 5G NR massive MIMO and mmWave, A2A cellular communications, and new paradigms”
Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Next-Generation Physical Layer Research (2022, background): “…holographic, and very large aperture multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) [5], unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite communication [6], machine learning (ML)-based air interface design [7], semantic communication [8], reconﬁgurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) [9], sensing and…”