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

Providing ubiquitous connectivity to diverse device types is the key challenge for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important component of the upcoming wireless networks that can potentially facilitate wireless broadcast and support high rate transmissions. Compared to the communications with fixed infrastructure, UAV has salient attributes, such as flexible deployment, strong line-of-sight (LoS) connection links, and additional design degrees of freedom with the controlled mobility. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on UAV communication towards 5G/B5G wireless networks is presented. We first briefly introduce essential background and the space-air-ground integrated networks, as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. We then provide an exhaustive review of various 5G techniques based on UAV platforms, which we categorize by different domains including physical layer, network layer, and joint communication, computing and caching. In addition, a great number of open research problems are outlined and identified as possible future research directions.

UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning in smart cities

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

The ambitious high data-rate applications in the envisioned future beyond fifth-generation (B5G) wireless networks require new solutions, including the advent of more advanced architectures than the ones already used in 5G networks, and the coalition of different communications schemes and technologies to enable these applications requirements. Among the candidate communications schemes for future wireless networks are non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes that allow serving more than one user in the same resource block by multiplexing users in other domains than frequency or time. In this way, NOMA schemes tend to offer several advantages over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes such as improved user fairness and spectral efficiency, higher cell-edge throughput, massive connectivity support, and low transmission latency. With these merits, NOMA-enabled transmission schemes are being increasingly looked at as promising multiple access schemes for future wireless networks. When the power domain is used to multiplex the users, it is referred to as the power domain NOMA (PD-NOMA). In this paper, we survey the integration of PD-NOMA with the enabling communications schemes and technologies that are expected to meet the various requirements of B5G networks. In particular, this paper surveys the different rate optimization scenarios studied in the literature when PD-NOMA is combined with one or more of the candidate schemes and technologies for B5G networks including multiple-input-single-output (MISO), multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), massive-MIMO (mMIMO), advanced antenna architectures, higher frequency millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) communications, advanced coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and reception schemes, cooperative communications, cognitive radio (CR), visible light communications (VLC), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted communications and others. The considered system models, the optimization methods utilized to maximize the achievable rates, and the main lessons learnt on the optimization and the performance of these NOMA-enabled schemes and technologies are discussed in detail along with the future research directions for these combined schemes. Moreover, the role of machine learning in optimizing these NOMA-enabled technologies is addressed.

A Survey of Rate-Optimal Power Domain NOMA With Enabling Technologies of Future Wireless Networks

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

Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is a new paradigm that enables social relationships among vehicles by integrating vehicle-to-everything communications and social networking properties into the vehicular environment. Through the provision of diverse socially-inspired applications and services, the emergence of SIoV helps to improve the road experience, traffic efficiency, road safety, travel comfort, and entertainment along the roads. However, the computation performance for those applications have been seriously affected by resource-limited on-board units as well as deployment costs and workloads of roadside units. Under such context, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing environment over SIoV with a three-layer integrated architecture is adopted in this paper. Within this architecture, we explore the energy-aware dynamic resource allocation problem by taking into account partial computation offloading, social content caching, and radio resource scheduling. Particularly, we develop an optimization framework for total utility maximization by jointly optimizing the transmit power of vehicle and the UAV trajectory. To resolve this problem, an energy-aware dynamic power optimization problem is formulated under the constraint of the evolution law of energy consumption state for each vehicle. By considering two cases, i.e., cooperation and noncooperation among vehicles, we obtain the optimal dynamic power allocation of the vehicle with a fixed UAV trajectory via dynamic programming method. In addition, under the condition of fixed power, a search algorithm is introduced to derive the optimized UAV trajectory based on acceptable ground-UAV distance metric and the optimal offloaded data size of the vehicle. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over alternative benchmark schemes.

Xiaobo Wu

Papers

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

Energy-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation in UAV Assisted Mobile Edge Computing Over Social Internet of Vehicles

Modified Reconstruction Algorithm for Probabilistic Inspection of Damage Based on Damaged Virtual Sensing Paths