Communication Scheduling with Diversity for Unmanned Aircraft Systems using Local 5G

The use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for critical public service missions by public organizations, local governments, and social users is expanding. Robust radio transmission by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is indispensable in these applications. One of the standards suitable for UAV wireless communications is local 5G. However, to introduce local 5G into a UAS, several problems specific to UASes must be solved. Challenges include the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio due to topography and obstacles, the uncertainty of the communication environment due to the movement of multiple UAVs, and the limitation of the frequency bandwidth. To address these problems and to introduce local 5G into the UAS, we propose a novel communication scheduling method. The method incorporates transmission modes with diversity. Our evaluations shows that total data volumes increase by 1.9∼3 times with the proposed scheduling method compared with transmission without diversity or efficient scheduling.