5G Wings: Investigating 5G-Connected Drones Performance in Non-Urban Areas | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

5G Wings: Investigating 5G-Connected Drones Performance in Non-Urban Areas


Abstract:

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become extremely popular for both military and civilian applications due to their ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, high maneuv...Show More

Abstract:

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become extremely popular for both military and civilian applications due to their ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, high maneuverability, and availability. Both applications, however, need reliable communication for command and control (C2) and/or data transmission. Utilizing commercial cellular networks for drone communication can enable beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operation, high data rate transmission, and secure communication. However, deployment of cellular-connected drones over commercial LTE/5G networks still presents various challenges such as sparse coverage outside urban areas, and interference caused to the network as the UAV is visible to many towers. Commercial 5G networks can offer various features for aerial user equipment (UE) far beyond what LTE could provide by taking advantage of mmWave, flexible numerology, slicing, and the capability of applying AI-based solutions. Limited experimental data is available to investigate the operation of aerial UEs over current, without any modification, commercial 5G networks, particularly in suburban and NON-URBAN areas. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of drone communications over the existing low-band and mid-band 5G networks in a suburban area for different velocities and elevations, comparing the performance against that of LTE. It is important to acknowledge that the network examined in this research is primarily designed and optimized to meet the requirements of terrestrial users, and may not adequately address the needs of aerial users. This paper not only reports the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) compared among all combinations of the test cases but also provides recommendations for aerial users to enhance their communication quality by controlling their trajectory.
Date of Conference: 05-08 September 2023
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 31 October 2023
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Conference Location: Toronto, ON, Canada

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I. Introduction

Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have been attracting significant attention from industry, academia, and the military by being cost-effective, available, versatile, and having high maneuverability. Various applications such as entertainment, package delivery, border surveillance, and remote sensing are a few examples to name [1]. Regardless of the intended application of the aerial vehicle, reliable C2 communication is crucial in all application domains to ensure safe operation. Additionally, high data rate communication is of significant importance in UAVs' applications in disaster relief, augmented reality, and environmental and infrastructure monitoring [2]. BVLOS operation, in turn, paves the way for various new applications of autonomous UAVs. However, it needs an ultra-reliable low latency communication [3]. Technologies such as WiFi [4], LoRA [5], and WiMAX [6] are available for UAV communication. However, the short communication range of WiFi, the low bandwidth of LoRA, and the latency, as well as the lack of support for highly mobile users in WiMAX, are the limiting factors that make the utilization of aforementioned technologies more concerning. More importantly, these technologies do not often meet the security expectations for UAV communication. The wide deployment, availability, high data transmission rates, reliability, and security of cellular networks make them ideal candidates for UAV communication. However, cellular networks are essentially designed and optimized to serve terrestrial users and might not be ready to serve aerial users, without modifications. Besides 3D coverage gaps due to cellular antennas being tilted toward the terrestrial users, frequent handovers, interference caused by UAVs to neighbor towers, mobility among different providers to maintain connectivity, and UAV identification are among the challenges of serving drones by cellular networks.

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