Smart Network Infrastructure to Localise Drones for Supporting Mission Critical Services

Lately, drones have seen significant usage in multipurpose services, most prominently in emergency and critical communications. Drones rely on wireless communication technologies to assist the delivery of `Mission Critical' (MC) services such as telemedicine, precision agriculture and public safety. However, to realize their potential in these areas, drones need to demonstrate ubiquitous coverage, seamless mobility, high reliability and enhanced security in emergency scenarios. The defacto solution to these requirements is anticipated to be 5G-based cellular connectivity, which facilitates reliability by enabling a `network of networks.' To assess the potential of the above solution, this paper outlines an MC drone use case and relates it to the advances in the 5G network infrastructure to establish a reference network architecture design for reliable drone communication. Within the proposed reference framework, a super-resolution localization technique to increase communication system reliability through drone-tracking has been considered. Our analysis emphasizes the need to further parameterize and integrate the super resolution localization algorithms to help continuously track the presence of drones in the future deployments of 5G mission critical networking technologies.