On the End-to-End Latency of Cellular-Connected UAV Communications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in military and civilian fields in the recent years. In order to give support to the vast amount of added value services, UAV communications have become a hot spot for the fifth generation (5G) and have a very broad development prospect. In this paper, based on the channel modeling results obtained by actual measurements, we evaluate the end-to-end delay of Long Term Evolution (LTE) for air-to-ground (A2G) communications in suburban environments. The results show that, in order to satisfy the reliability and latency requirements of the critical communications, the base stations (BSs) deployment and the flight routes need to be carefully considered since small increments on the flight distance can have great influence on the packet success rate and the end-to-end delay. The obtained results are of great importance to evaluate if current LTE deployments can support critical communications for cellular-connected UAVs.