The Sky Is Not the Limit: LTE for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

By Xingqin Lin, V. Yajnanarayana, S. Muruganathan, Shiwei Gao, H. Asplund, Helka-Liina Maattanen, Mattias Bergström, Sebastian Euler, Y.-P. Eric Wang. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2017

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many use cases of UAVs require beyond visual LOS communications. Mobile networks offer wide-area, high-speed, and secure wireless connectivity, which can enhance control and safety of UAV operations and enable beyond visual LOS use cases. In this article, we share some of our experience in LTE connectivity for low-altitude small UAVs. We first identify the typical airborne connectivity requirements and characteristics, highlight the different propagation conditions for UAVs and mobiles on the ground with measurement and ray tracing results, and present simulation results to shed light on the feasibility of providing LTE connectivity for UAVs. We also present several ideas on potential enhancements for improving LTE connectivity performance and identify fruitful avenues for future research.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88ac5adf4bae1ad887d3c8576ff0f24b63e1e6a9

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 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Securing UAV Communications via Joint Trajectory and Power Control (2018, result): “The legitimate link from the UAV to the ground node and the eavesdropping link from the UAV to the eavesdropper are both assumed to be LoS channels, as the recent measurement results in [43] have shown that the LoS model offers a good approximation for practical UAV-ground communications.”
Joint Trajectory and Communication Design for Multi-UAV Enabled Wireless Networks (2017, background): “In particular, UAVs typically have high possibilities of line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-ground communication links, which are appealing to the wireless service providers [4].”
5G-Advanced Toward 6G: Past, Present, and Future (2023, background): “In Release 18, the work on connected UAV covers several key aspects [100], [101].”
Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Toward 6G (2021, background): “2) Localization of IoT devices with UAVs: In various applications of wireless networks location-aware services are required.”
Cellular-Connected UAV: Potential, Challenges, and Promising Technologies (2018, unknown): “[3] X.”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, background): “Indeed, recent 3GPP studies have conﬁrmed that UAVs receive weak signals from existing terrestrial BSs and hence supporting aerial users will require further research and development [53], [54].”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “In [38], the authors shed light on the feasibility of providing connectivity for UAVs and presents several ideas to improve LTE connectivity.”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “In parallel to the ﬁeld tests discussed above, there have been research efforts on the performance evaluation of cellular-connected UAVs via numerical simulations [12,23,195]–[197] or theoretical analysis [57,198]–[200].”
Cellular-Enabled UAV Communication: A Connectivity-Constrained Trajectory Optimization Perspective (2018, background): “Moreover, it was shown in [15], [16] that the increase in the number of aerial users leads to stronger aerial interference and”
Interference Management for Cellular-Connected UAVs: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach (2018, unknown): “Meanwhile, the work in [6] uses measurements and ray tracing simulations to study the airborne connectivity requirements and propagation characteristics of UAVs.”
A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2018, background): “and scenarios introduce unique technical challenges, and these are recently being investigated by telecommunications companies such as AT&T [18], Vodafone [19], Ericsson [20], Nokia [21], [22] and Qualcomm [23], among others.”
Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2020, background): “For effective use of UAVs in cellular-connected UAVs, low latency and reliable communication between UAVs and ground base stations is required [22], [23].”
UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges (2020, unknown): “Cell 2”
Survey on UAV Cellular Communications: Practical Aspects, Standardization Advancements, Regulation, and Security Challenges (2018, background): “LOS control and establishing a reliable communication [2], [37]–[40].”
Common Throughput Maximization in UAV-Enabled OFDMA Systems With Delay Consideration (2018, background): “For example, for the UAV at an altitude of H = 120 m, the LoS probability of air-to-ground links in rural environment exceeds 95% [36].”
A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “Moreover, in [178], propagation characteristics Fig.”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “For example, for a UAV operating at an altitude of 120 m, the LoS probability of A2G links in a rural environment exceeds 95% [136].”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, unknown): “Therefore, UAV operators need to provide more information about the trajectories and 3D placements of UAVs to construct more dynamic radio resource management [246].”