Survey of Important Issues in UAV Communication Networks

By Lav Gupta, Raj Jain, Gabor Vaszkun. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2016

2,052 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications, where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically as compared to single UAV systems. However, there are many issues to be resolved before effective use of UAVs can be made to provide stable and reliable context-specific networks. Much of the work carried out in the areas of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) does not address the unique characteristics of the UAV networks. UAV networks may vary from slow dynamic to dynamic and have intermittent links and fluid topology. While it is believed that ad hoc mesh network would be most suitable for UAV networks yet the architecture of multi-UAV networks has been an understudied area. Software defined networking (SDN) could facilitate flexible deployment and management of new services and help reduce cost, increase security and availability in networks. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETS and VANETS. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints, and changing link quality. UAVs may fail and the network may get partitioned making delay and disruption tolerance an important design consideration. Limited life of the node and dynamicity of the network lead to the requirement of seamless handovers, where researchers are looking at the work done in the areas of MANETs and VANETs, but the jury is still out. As energy supply on UAVs is limited, protocols in various layers should contribute toward greening of the network. This paper surveys the work done toward all of these outstanding issues, relating to this new class of networks, so as to spur further research in these areas.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0cb07ef9086985c6a8bfec377f1ce1ff1eac5af

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Citations in the corpus

Physical-Layer Security of 5G Wireless Networks for IoT: Challenges and Opportunities (2019, background): “UAVs have enormous potential in the public and civil domains, and UAV-aided communications also have emerged as an effective solution to provide large coverage and dynamic capacity for IoT applications [20].”
Classifications and Applications of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Confidentiality: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “21For obtaining more background information about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), we refer the reader to [410] and [411].”
Taking Drones to the Next Level: Cooperative Distributed Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicular Networks for Small and Mini Drones (2017, background): “Given their low cost, flexible maneuvering capability, and unmanned operation, UAVs have been widely used in both civilian operations and military missions, including aerial mapping, disaster rescue, agricultural irrigation, and military surveillance and attack [1].”
Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey (2018, background): “[12] surveyed some important issues about high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, energy constraints, and changing”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “The survey [32] discusses the architecture of multi-UAV networks, proposing software defined networking for flexible deployment and management of new services, and”
Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication (2022, background): “Driven by the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)’ on-demand deployment and strong LoS links features [22], [23], it is expected to be a cost-effective aerial platform to provide enhanced ISAC service.”
Joint Trajectory and Power Optimization for UAV Relay Networks (2018, background): “THE unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an emerging technique in military, public and civil applications [1].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “ability, data integrity, data authorization, and reliability [276].”
Cellular UAV-to-X Communications: Design and Optimization for Multi-UAV Networks (2018, background): “UNMANNED aerial vehicle (UAV) is an emerging facility which has been effectively applied in military, public, and civil applications [2].”
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A Survey on Green 6G Network: Architecture and Technologies (2019, background): “UAV network has been applied to temporary emergency communication services, however, there are issues to be tackled before stable and reliable UAV network can be introduced into common application scenarios [27].”
UAV Trajectory Optimization for Data Offloading at the Edge of Multiple Cells (2018, background): “Correspondingly, the performance of both the schemes in Case I is better than that in Case II, due to the fact that the interference will become stronger when the users served by UAV and BSs become closer, no matter which optimization is taken.”
Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks for Civil Applications: A Communications Viewpoint (2016, background): “Surveys addressing communication demands of aerial networks have pointed out many open issues that may be of interest to the research community interested in aerial network design [13], [24], [29], which are summarized in Section II.”
Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities (2019, background): “tocols in various layers should contribute towards the greening of the network [113].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted UAV Communication: Joint Trajectory Design and Passive Beamforming (2019, background): “,N − 1, (1a) ‖q[N ]− qF ‖2 ≤ D, q[1] = q0, (1b)”
Jamming Attacks and Anti-Jamming Strategies in Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “mesh network topology, in which UAVs communicate with each other as an ad-hoc network, and a small number of them may communicate with ground control station [167].”