The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have attracted a lot of attention, since they represent a new potential market. Along with the maturity of the technology and relevant regulations, a worldwide deployment of these UAVs is expected. Thanks to the high mobility of drones, they can be used to provide a lot of applications, such as service delivery, pollution mitigation, farming, and in the rescue operations. Due to its ubiquitous usability, the UAV will play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, and it may become the main key enabler of this vision. While these UAVs would be deployed for specific objectives (e.g., service delivery), they can be, at the same time, used to offer new IoT value-added services when they are equipped with suitable and remotely controllable machine type communications (MTCs) devices (i.e., sensors, cameras, and actuators). However, deploying UAVs for the envisioned purposes cannot be done before overcoming the relevant challenging issues. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, such as physical collision, but also regulation issues as this nascent technology could be associated with problems like breaking the privacy of people or even use it for illegal operations like drug smuggling. Providing the communication to UAVs is another challenging issue facing the deployment of this technology. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the UAVs and the related issues will be introduced. In addition, our envisioned UAV-based architecture for the delivery of UAV-based value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced, and the relevant key challenges and requirements will be presented.

Low-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Internet of Things Services: Comprehensive Survey and Future Perspectives

Space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN), as an integration of satellite systems, aerial networks, and terrestrial communications, has been becoming an emerging architecture and attracted intensive research interest during the past years. Besides bringing significant benefits for various practical services and applications, SAGIN is also facing many unprecedented challenges due to its specific characteristics, such as heterogeneity, self-organization, and time-variability. Compared to traditional ground or satellite networks, SAGIN is affected by the limited and unbalanced network resources in all three network segments, so that it is difficult to obtain the best performances for traffic delivery. Therefore, the system integration, protocol optimization, resource management, and allocation in SAGIN is of great significance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the state-of-the-art of the SAGIN since existing survey papers focused on either only one single network segment in space or air, or the integration of space-ground, neglecting the integration of all the three network segments. In light of this, we present in this paper a comprehensive review of recent research works concerning SAGIN from network design and resource allocation to performance analysis and optimization. After discussing several existing network architectures, we also point out some technology challenges and future directions.

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey

Unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining a lot of popularity among an ever growing community of amateurs as well as service providers. Emerging technologies, such as LTE 4G/5G networks and mobile edge computing, will widen the use case scenarios of UAVs. In this article, we discuss the potential of UAVs, equipped with IoT devices, in delivering IoT services from great heights. A high-level view of a UAV-based integrative IoT platform for the delivery of IoT services from large height, along with the overall system orchestrator, is presented in this article. As an envisioned use case of the platform, the article demonstrates how UAVs can be used for crowd surveillance based on face recognition. To evaluate the use case, we study the offloading of video data processing to a MEC node compared to the local processing of video data onboard UAVs. For this, we developed a testbed consisting of a local processing node and one MEC node. To perform face recognition, the Local Binary Pattern Histogram method from the Open Source Computer Vision is used. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the MEC-based offloading approach in saving the scarce energy of UAVs, reducing the processing time of recognition, and promptly detecting suspicious persons.

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UAV-Based IoT Platform: A Crowd Surveillance Use Case

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received considerable attention from regulators, industry and research community, due to rapid growth in a broad range of applications. Particularly, UAVs are being used to provide a promising solution to reliable and cost-effective wireless communications from the sky. The deployment of UAVs has been regarded as an alternative complement of existing cellular systems, to achieve higher transmission efficiency with enhanced coverage and capacity. However, heavily utilized microwave spectrum bands below 6 GHz utilized by legacy wireless systems are insufficient to attain remarkable data rate enhancement for numerous emerging applications. To resolve the spectrum crunch crisis and satisfy the requirements of 5G and beyond mobile communications, one potential solution is to use the abundance of unoccupied bandwidth available at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies. Inspired by the technique potentials, mmWave communications have also paved the way into the widespread use of UAVs to assist wireless networks for future 5G and beyond wireless applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on current achievements in the integration of 5G mmWave communications into UAV-assisted wireless networks. More precisely, a taxonomy to classify the existing research issues is presented, by considering seven cutting-edge solutions. Subsequently, we provide a brief overview of 5G mmWave communications for UAV-assisted wireless networks from two aspects, i.e., key technical advantages and challenges as well as potential applications. Based on the proposed taxonomy, we further discuss in detail the state-of-the-art issues, solutions, and open challenges for this newly emerging area. Lastly, we complete this survey by pointing out open issues and shedding new light on future directions for further research on this area.

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A Survey on 5G Millimeter Wave Communications for UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

Owing to the explosive expansion of wireless communication and networking technologies, cost-effective unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently emerged and soon they will occupy the major part of our sky. UAVs can be exploited to efficiently accomplish complex missions when cooperatively organized as an ad hoc network, thus creating the well-known flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). The establishment of such networks is not feasible without deploying an efficient networking model allowing a reliable exchange of information between UAVs. FANET inherits common features and characteristics from mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and their sub-classes, such as vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unfortunately, UAVs are often deployed in the sky adopting a mobility model dictated by the nature of missions that they are expected to handle, and therefore, differentiate themselves from any traditional networks. Moreover, several flying constraints and the highly dynamic topology of FANETs make the design of routing protocols a complicated task. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is presented covering the architecture, the constraints, the mobility models, the routing techniques, and the simulation tools dedicated to FANETs. A classification, descriptions, and comparative studies of an important number of existing routing protocols dedicated to FANETs are detailed. Furthermore, the paper depicts future challenge perspectives, helping scientific researchers to discover some themes that have been addressed only ostensibly in the literature and need more investigation. The novelty of this survey is its uniqueness to provide a complete analysis of the major FANET routing protocols and to critically compare them according to different constraints based on crucial parameters, thus better presenting the state of the art of this specific area of research.

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Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Survey, Constraints, and Future Challenge Perspectives

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is increasing day by day. In recent years, UAVs are being used in increasing number of civil applications, such as policing, fire-fighting, etc in addition to military applications. Instead of using one large UAV, multiple UAVs are nowadays used for higher coverage area and accuracy. Therefore, networking models are required to allow two or more UAV nodes to communicate directly or via relay node(s). Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) are formed which is basically an ad hoc network for UAVs. This is relatively a new technology in network family where requirements vary largely from traditional networking model, such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In this paper, Flying Ad-Hoc Networks are surveyed along with its challenges compared to traditional ad hoc networks. The existing routing protocols for FANETs are then classified into six major categories which are critically analyzed and compared based on various performance criteria. Our comparative analysis will help network engineers in choosing appropriate routing protocols based on the specific scenario where the FANET will be deployed.

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On the routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks

To improve highway transport security, VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) is used which is a developing technology incorporating ad hoc network, cellular technology and wireless LAN. VANETs are different from other type ad hoc networks by their cross network constructions, node association features and new application setups. The approach of an effective routing protocol for VANETs is vital as VANETs show various distinctive networking research challenges. In this paper, we discuss the research challenges of routing in VANETs and compare recent routing protocols of VANETs.

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Comparison among Different Routing Protocols of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In the field of electronic devices, transistor based CMOS technology has been a significant invention. But in the context of modern technology, CMOS has been facing some limitations, which can be overcome by the Quantum dot Cellular Automata (QCA) based nanotechnology. This promising technology allows us to design digital logic circuits, which consumes less power and can create the low-density device. In this paper, we have proposed the design of 4 - to - 2 encoder and priority encoder by using 3-dot based QCA architecture. This design has been simulated and then compared with the existing designs, which indicates that it has less number of cells and less consumed area. In near future, QCA based design can bring revolutionary change in the field of electronic devices.

An Efficient Design of 4 - to - 2 Encoder and Priority Encoder Based on 3-dot QCA Architecture

Human-lip detection is an important criterion for many automated modern system in present day. Like computerized speech reading, face recognition etc. system can work more precisely if human-lip can detect accurately. There are many processes for detecting human-lip. In this paper an approach is developed so that the region of a human-lip can be detected, we called it lip contour. For this a region-based Active Contour Model (ACM) is introduced with watershed segmentation. In this model we used global energy terms instead of local energy terms because, global energy gives better convergence rate for malicious environment. At the time of ACM initialization by using H8 based on Lyapunov stability theory, the system gives more accurate and stable result.

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Md. Hasan Tareque

Papers

Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Survey, Constraints, and Future Challenge Perspectives

On the routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Comparison among Different Routing Protocols of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

An Efficient Design of 4 - to - 2 Encoder and Priority Encoder Based on 3-dot QCA Architecture

Human Lips-Contour Recognition and Tracing