Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found numerous applications and are expected to bring fertile business opportunities in the next decade. Among various enabling technologies for UAVs, wireless communication is essential and has drawn significantly growing attention in recent years. Compared to the conventional terrestrial communications, UAVs’ communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement in the 3-D space. Several critical issues arise, including the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels and induced strong aerial-terrestrial network interference, the distinct communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for UAV control messages versus payload data, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the exploitation of the new design degree of freedom (DoF) brought by the highly controllable 3-D UAV mobility. In this article, we give a tutorial overview of the recent advances in UAV communications to address the above issues, with an emphasis on how to integrate UAVs into the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) and future cellular networks. In particular, we partition our discussion into two promising research and application frameworks of UAV communications, namely UAV-assisted wireless communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into the network as new aerial communication platforms and users, respectively. Furthermore, we point out promising directions for future research.

Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted great interest in rapid deployment for both civil and military applications. UAV communication has its own distinctive channel characteristics compared to the widely used cellular or satellite systems. Accurate channel characterization is crucial for the performance optimization and design of efficient UAV communication. However, several challenges exist in UAV channel modeling. For example, the propagation characteristics of UAV channels are under explored for spatial and temporal variations in non–stationary channels. Additionally, airframe shadowing has not yet been investigated for small size rotary UAVs. This paper provides an extensive survey of the measurement methods proposed for UAV channel modeling that use low altitude platforms and discusses various channel characterization efforts. We also review from a contemporary perspective of UAV channel modeling approaches, and outline future research challenges in this domain.

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A Survey of Channel Modeling for UAV Communications

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, wide availability, and relative ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail, relative to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios.

A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The scalable video coding (SVC) standard as an extension of H.264/AVC allows efficient, standard-based temporal, spatial, and quality scalability of video bit streams. Scalability of a video bit stream allows for media bit rate as well as for device capability adaptation. Moreover, adaptation of the bit rate of a video signal is a desirable key feature, if limitation in network resources, mostly characterized by throughput variations, varying delay or transmission errors, need to be considered. Typically, in mobile networks the throughput, delay and errors of a connection (link) depend on the current reception conditions, which are largely influenced by a number of physical factors. In order to cope with the typically varying characteristics of mobile communication channels in unicast, multicast, or broadcast services, different methods for increasing robustness and achieving quality of service are desirable. We will give an overview of SVC and its relation to mobile delivery methods. Furthermore, innovative use cases are introduced which apply SVC in mobile networks.

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Mobile Video Transmission Using Scalable Video Coding

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found numerous applications and are expected to bring fertile business opportunities in the next decade. Among various enabling technologies for UAVs, wireless communication is essential and has drawn significantly growing attention in recent years. Compared to the conventional terrestrial communications, UAVs' communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement in the three-dimensional (3D) space. Several critical issues arise, including the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels and resultant strong aerial-terrestrial network interference, the distinct communication quality of service (QoS) requirements for UAV control messages versus payload data, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the exploitation of the new design degree of freedom (DoF) brought by the highly controllable 3D UAV mobility. In this paper, we give a tutorial overview of the recent advances in UAV communications to address the above issues, with an emphasis on how to integrate UAVs into the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) and future cellular networks. In particular, we partition our discussions into two promising research and application frameworks of UAV communications, namely UAV-assisted wireless communications and cellular-connected UAVs,where UAVs serve as aerial communication platforms and users, respectively. Furthermore, we point out promising directions for future research and investigation.

Accessing From The Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond

In this letter, a multiple-input multiple-output detection algorithm based on the alternating direction method of the multipliers (ADMM) is proposed for single-carrier transmissions in time dispersive channels. The ADMM is applied as a heuristic to solve the maximum likelihood detection problem for arbitrary signal constellations formulated in the frequency domain. This approach allows most of the decoding steps to be implemented in the frequency domain with an overall reduced complexity cost. Simulation results show that the performances close to the matched filter bound can be attained in large problem sizes, even in overloaded scenarios.

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MIMO Detection and Equalization for Single-Carrier Systems Using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

The increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, by civilians has grown exponentially and their autonomous flight control systems have improved significantly, which has resulted in a greater number of accidents and dangerous situations. To help resolve this problem, in this paper, we address the use of low-cost Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms for simulating a global navigation satellite system (GNSS), more specifically the global positioning system (GPS), in order to transmit false signals and induce a location error on the targeted GPS receiver. Using this approach, a defensive system can be implemented which can divert, or even take control of unauthorized UAVs whose flight path depends on the information obtained by the GPS system.

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Capture of UAVs Through GPS Spoofing Using Low-Cost SDR Platforms

The deployment of increasingly dense heterogeneous mobile networks can create high levels of interference among users that, combined with severely time-dispersive channels, can result in substantial performance degradation. To cope with both effects, in this paper, we propose an iterative block decision feedback equalizer (IBDFE) for single carrier (SC) transmissions that makes use of the correlation between the interference in the receiving antennas and minimizes the mean squared error (MSE) of the detected symbols. Our analytic and simulated performance results show that the proposed receiver can clearly outperform the conventional IBDFE and the linear interference rejection combining (IRC) detector in severely time-dispersive channels with strong cochannel interference.

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Interference-Aware Iterative Block Decision Feedback Equalizer for Single-Carrier Transmission

Generalized spatial modulations (GSM) represent a novel multiple input multiple output (MIMO) scheme, which can be regarded as a compromise between spatial multiplexing MIMO and conventional spatial modulations, achieving both spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. Due to the high computational complexity of the maximum likelihood detector in large antenna settings and symbol constellations, in this correspondence paper we propose a lower complexity iterative suboptimal detector. The derived algorithm comprises a sequence of simple processing steps, namely, an unconstrained Euclidean distance minimization problem, an element-wise projection over the signal constellation, and a projection over the set of valid active antenna combinations. To deal with scenarios where the number of possible active antenna combinations is large, an alternative version of the algorithm, which adopts a simpler cardinality projection, is also presented. Simulation results show that, compared with other existing approaches, both versions of the proposed algorithm are effective in challenging underdetermined scenarios where the number of receiver antennas is lower than the number of transmitter antennas.

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Iterative Signal Detection for Large-Scale GSM-MIMO Systems

In this paper we consider the use of non-uniform QAM constellations (quadrature amplitude modulation) for the transmission of multicast and broadcast services in the downlink connection of a WCDMA (wideband code division multiplexing) system. The objective is to increase the efficiency of the transmission by splitting the information in classes with different importance and mapping the bit streams of these classes to more or less protected positions of the modulation symbols. With this strategy, the most important information streams can be received by all users while the less relevant information will only be extracted by users with good propagation conditions. It is shown that the multipath interference introduced by the channel induces a severe performance loss for these modulations. A low complexity iterative turbo multipath interference canceller (MPIC) that uses feedback information from the turbo-decoder is proposed for suppressing this interference. Computer simulation results are presented, showing that a considerable performance gain can be obtained with the use of the iterative MPIC.

Nuno Souto

Papers

MIMO Detection and Equalization for Single-Carrier Systems Using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Capture of UAVs Through GPS Spoofing Using Low-Cost SDR Platforms

Interference-Aware Iterative Block Decision Feedback Equalizer for Single-Carrier Transmission

Iterative Signal Detection for Large-Scale GSM-MIMO Systems

Iterative turbo multipath interference cancellation for WCDMA systems with non-uniform modulations