Enabling Ultra-Dense UAV-Aided Network with Overlapped Spectrum Sharing: Potential and Approaches

UAV aided communication technology holds tremendous potential to upgrade outdoor link throughput and provide on-demand wireless services. The flexible deployment characteristic makes UAV-aided networks competent at emergency situations, including natural disasters and sudden traffic hotspots. In this backdrop, UAVs are required to be densely deployed to accommodate the huge volume of data traffic, where interference amid the neighboring cells turns out to be extremely challenging. To break this stalemate, this article systematically investigates spectrum sharing technology for ultra-dense UAV-aided networks from the architecture level down to the physical layer. We shed light on design principles and key challenges in utilizing overlapped spectrum for interference-enabled concurrent transmissions. With these principles in mind, we introduce SpecShare, which utilizes coding redundancy at the PHY layer for UAV spectrum sharing. We explore the optimal UAV placement strategy in the network layer to fully unleash the potential of such spectrum sharing capacity. We discuss the feasibility of SpecShare, and demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of network throughput.