Cellular Connectivity for Advanced Air Mobility: Use Cases and Beamforming Approaches

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is a rapidly growing segment of the transport industry, which encompasses a range of innovative use cases, technologies, and aerial vehicles. For example, urban air mobility, one of the driving use cases of AAM, employs electrical vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to offer efficient and on-demand air transportation for goods as well as human passengers. Key stakeholders, such as original equipment manufacturers, prospective AAM operators and communications service providers are exploring suitable technologies to meet various service, safety, and sustainability requirements. In this article, we discuss the most important AAM use cases and associated requirements from a cellular connectivity perspective and summarize the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization activities addressing these requirements. While previous works have investigated the role of cellular connectivity for command and control of uncrewed aerial vehicles, other types of AAM vehicles, such as flying buses or flying taxis likely impose more demanding requirements due to higher flying altitudes and demands for mobile broadband services for crew members and passengers. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of beamforming alternatives that are applicable for providing cellular connectivity in AAM scenarios. The results show the benefits of 3GPP standardized and to-be-standardized features, such as codebook-based beamforming, multi-user multiple-input multiple-output systems, and user equipment directional antennas in cellular networks with mixed terrestrial and aerial users.