Integrating Communications and Control for UAV Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications play an important role in building the space-air-ground network and realizing the seamless wide-area coverage thanks to its long-range connectivity, high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low latency. Different from the traditional ground-only communications, the control techniques tightly impact UAV communications, which could be jointly designed to enhance the performance of data transmission. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and challenges of combining the communications and control in UAV systems. For single-UAV scenario, we introduce a new frequency-dependent 3D channel model. We then show how to perform channel tracking with a flight control system as well as how to mechanically and electronically formulate the transmission beams. For multi-UAV scenario, we present new techniques as cooperative communications, self-positioning, trajectory design, resource allocation, and seamless coverage. In the end, we provide some interesting discussions over communication protocol, secrecy, 3D dynamic topology heterogeneous networks, and low-cost design for practical UAV applications.