Combined Airspace and Non-Terrestrial 6G Networks for Advanced Air Mobility

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is defined as the transportation of goods and humans via aerial vehicles (AVs) for both urban and rural air mobility. For a safe and seamless operation of AVs, an ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) service for their command and control link is desired. Combined Airspace and Non-Terrestrial Networks (ASN) have the potential to enable remote piloting for AAM to meet the stringent URLLC reliability and latency requirements of an AV. We propose to utilize multi-connectivity paths through direct-air-to-ground communication (DA2GC), relaying AV s via air-to-air communication (A2A), high altitude platform (HAP), and LEO satellites. We formulate an optimization problem for multi-connectivity path selection with their respective resource block (RB) allocation under limited resource constraints. The problem is solved by decomposing it into two sub-problems of multi-connectivity path selection and RB allocation. An efficient RB allocation scheme is proposed to allocate the limited RB resources of each path to the best AV s using the Knapsack al-gorithm. Next, we perform multi-connectivity selection to reduce the total cost by preferring the available low-cost paths while meeting the reliability requirements. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme can reduce up to 28 % of total cost by considering the differentiated cost for path selection as compared to the cost-agnostic resource allocation.