A Study on Switching between Aerial Systems with UxNB Functionality

The UxNB, the Uncrewed Areal Vehicle (UAV) with on-board base station, is emerging as a means of easily providing communication services to disaster areas that do not have or lack communication infrastructure or require temporary coverage for mobile users and hots-spot events. However, with the short UAV operation time of 15-20 minutes due to battery limitations, it is difficult to provide long-term communication services. In order to provide continuous mobile communication services in the service area, the UxNB switching is required, allowing the deployment of new UxNBs with high battery power to replace the existing UxNBs. In this paper, we present the UxNB-based temporary communication infrastructure and UxNB switching procedures and techniques for maintaining 5G cell coverage for ground User Equipment (UE)s in the infrastructure.