UAVs-Enabled Maritime Communications: UAVs-Enabled Maritime Communications: Opportunities and Challenges

The next generation of wireless communication systems will integrate terrestrial and nonterrestrial networks, targeting the coverage of the undercovered regions, especially those connected to marine activities. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based connectivity solutions offer significant advances to support conventional terrestrial networks. However, the use of UAVs for maritime communication is still an unexplored area of research. Therefore, this article highlights different aspects of UAV-based maritime communication, including the basic architecture, various channel characteristics, and use cases. The article afterward discusses several open research problems, such as mobility management, trajectory optimization, interference management, and beam forming.