Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles: opportunities and challenges

By Yong Zeng, Rui Zhang, Teng Joon Lim. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2016

3,529 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms, on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly reconfigured, and likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e022e57ec1877de91d9f129d31bbae4053d7983e

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

1. Rui Zhang
2. Yong Zeng
3. Qingqing Wu
4. Merouane Debbah
5. Shuowen Zhang
6. Walid Saad
7. Jie Xu
8. Yuanwei Liu

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Rui Zhang
2. Yong Zeng
3. Merouane Debbah
4. Qingqing Wu
5. Walid Saad
6. Medhi Bennis
7. Robert Schober
8. Lajos Hanzo

Citations in the corpus

• Ultra Reliable UAV Communication Using Altitude and Cooperation Diversity (2017, background): “Finally, an overview of UAV-assisted wireless communication and networking can be found in [12].”
• 3D Trajectory Optimization in Rician Fading for UAV-Enabled Data Harvesting (2019, neutral): “(q[1] , z[1]) = (q0 , z0) and (q[M + 1] T , z[M + 1]) = (qF , zF ).”
• Communications and Control for Wireless Drone-Based Antenna Array (2017, methodology): “Hence, in the proposed drone-based antenna array system, we adopt quadrotor drones which can hover (remain stationary) and move to any direction [30].”
• Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, neutral): “[27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40].”
• Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, methodology): “In particular, several magazine [12,13,20]–[23] and survey [11,24]– [34] papers on wireless communications and networks with UAVs have appeared.”
• Joint Offloading and Trajectory Design for UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Systems (2019, background): “To seize the growing opportunity, extensive studies have been dedicated to applying UAVs to various kinds of communication platforms [13].”
• UAV-Assisted Relaying and Edge Computing: Scheduling and Trajectory Optimization (2018, background): “Due to the attractive advantages of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for its easy deployment, flexible movement, and line-of-sight (LoS) connections, and so on, UAV-enabled wireless communication networks have been much researched in recent years [13–16].”
• Proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming in fading channels (2015, background): “-generation (5G) cellular networks without going through cellular infrastructures. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be employed as mobile relays to assist information exchange between ground users [6]–[8]. These emerging infrastructure-freewireless communications, however, can be used by criminal”
• Communications and Signals Design for Wireless Power Transmission (2016, background): “bring drastic performance improvement for numerous UAVenabled applications [58], [59].”
• Trajectory Design and Power Control for Multi-UAV Assisted Wireless Networks: A Machine Learning Approach (2018, background): “The future wireless communication systems are expected to meet unprecedented demands for high quality wireless services, which imposes challenges on the conventional terrestrial communication networks, especially in traffic hotspots such as in a football stadium or rock concert [4]–[6].”
• Joint Trajectory and Communication Design for Multi-UAV Enabled Wireless Networks (2017, background): “Although a single UAV has demonstrated its advantages in performance enhancement for wireless networks [1], [16], [23], [25]–[29], it has limited capability in general and may not guarantee availability during the entire mission due to its practical size, weight and power (SWAP) constraints [9].”
• A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “Moreover, the surveys in [14], [15], [31], [33], and [48]–[54] remain restricted to isolated UAV topics and use cases in wireless networking.”
• Common Throughput Maximization in UAV-Enabled OFDMA Systems With Delay Consideration (2018, background): “Besides being “drone clients” of wireless networks, UAVs can also be employed as various aerial communication platforms, to help improve the performance of existing wireless communication systems such as cellular networks [6], [7].”
• Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, background): “Besides the convenience of wireless communications, information security related problems are also critical and cannot be ignored [4], [5], [6].”
• Joint Computation and Communication Design for UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing in IoT (2019, background): “Due to the high flexible mobility, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has attracted significant research interest in academia [5]- [9].”
• A Survey on the Convergence of Edge Computing and AI for UAVs: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, methodology): “Regarding the UAV-UAV channel characteristics, the UAV-UAV channels are mostly dominated by the LoS component and even though there can exist limited multipath fading (because of ground reflections), it has minimal impact relative to what is experienced by UAV-ground or ground-ground channels [118].”
• Multi-Tier Drone Architecture for 5G/B5G Cellular Networks: Challenges, Trends, and Prospects (2017, background): “As such, HAPs are preferred for reliable wireless coverage in very large geographic areas [4].”
• Beyond 5G With UAVs: Foundations of a 3D Wireless Cellular Network (2018, background): “However, none of these previous works [4]–[8], [13]–[16], [18]–[22], [25], studied a 3D wireless network composing of aerial base stations and users (i.”