Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cellular Communications With Non-Terrestrial Networks (Ntn)

ABSTRACT

This work is on an unmanned aerial vehicle cellular communications with non-terrestrial networks which is an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that includes Wireless communication systems. This provides cost- effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy- constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces wide range of coverage. In this work, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, hard ware and software design, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

APPROVAL PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWELDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER ONE

1.0     INTRODUCTION

1.1     BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT

• AIM AND OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT
• SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
• SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT
• LIMITATIONS OF THE PROJECT
• RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
• PROJECT ORGANISATION

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

• REVIEW OF THE STUDY
• REVIEW OF RELATED WORK
• BASIC NETWORKING ARCHITECTURE
• CHANNEL CHARACTERISTICS
• MAIN DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
• COMMUNICATIONS WITH UAV CONTROLLED MOBILITY

CHAPTER THREE

3.0     MATERIAL AND METHOD

CHAPTER FOUR

4.0     RESULTS

CHAPTER FIVE

• CONCLUSION
• RECOMMENDATION

REFERENCES

CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                               INTRODUCTION

1.1                               BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

With their high mobility and low cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also commonly known as drones or remotely piloted aircrafts, have found a wide range of applications during the past few decades [Valavanis, 2015]. Historically, UAVs have been primarily used in the military, mainly deployed in hostile territory to reduce pilot losses. With the continuous cost reduction and device miniaturization, small UAVs (typically with weight not exceeding 25 kg) are now more easily accessible to the public and thus numerous new applications in civilian and commercial domains have emerged, with typical examples including weather monitoring, forest fire detection, traffic control, cargo transport, emergency search and rescue, communication relaying, etc [US Department of Transportation, 2013]. UAVs can be broadly classified into two categories: fixed wing versus rotary wing, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, fixed-wing UAVs usually have high speed and heavy payload, but they must maintain a continuous forward motion to remain aloft, thus are not suitable for stationary applications like close inspection. In contrast, rotary-wing UAVs such as quadcopters, though having limited mobility and payload, are able to move in any direction as well as to stay stationary in the air. Thus, the choice of UAVs critically depends on the applications.

Among the various applications enabled by UASs, the use of UAVs for achieving high-speed wire- less communications is expected to play an important role in future communication systems. In fact, UAV-aided wireless communication offers one promising solution to provide wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage due to e.g., severe shadowing by urban or mountainous terrain, or damage to the communication infrastructure caused by natural disasters [Merwaday, 2015]. Note that besides UAVs, one alternative solution for wireless connectivity is via high-altitude platforms (HAPs), such as balloons, which usually operate in the stratosphere that is tens of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. HAP-based communications have several advantages over the UAV-based low-altitude platforms (LAPs), such as wider coverage, longer endurance, etc. Thus, HAP is in general preferred for providing reliable wireless coverage for a large geographic area. However, compared to HAP-based communications, or those based on terrestrial or satellite systems, wireless communications with low-altitude UAVs (typically at an altitude not exceeding several kilometers) also have several important advantages. First, on-demand UASs are more cost-effective and can be much more swiftly deployed, which makes them especially suitable for unexpected or limited-duration missions. Besides, with the aid of low-altitude UAVs, short-range line-of-sight (LoS) communication links can be established in most scenarios, which potentially leads to significant performance improvement over direct communication between source and destination (if possible) or HAP relaying over long-distance LoS links. In addition, the maneuverability of UAVs offers new opportunities for performance enhancement, through the dynamic adjustment of UAV state to best suit the communication environment. Furthermore, adaptive communications can be jointly designed with UAV mobility control to further improve the communication performance. For example, when a UAV experiences good channels with the ground terminals, besides transmitting with higher rates, it can also lower its speed to sustain the good wireless connectivity to transmit more data to the ground terminals. These evident benefits make UAV-aided wireless communication a promising integral component of future wireless systems, which need to support more diverse applications with orders-of-magnitude capacity improvement over the current systems. There three typical use cases of UAV-aided wireless communications, which are:

• UAV-aided ubiquitous coverage, where UAVs are deployed to assist the existing communication infrastructure, if any, in providing seamless wireless coverage within the serving

Two example scenarios are rapid service recovery after partial or complete infrastructure damage due to natural disasters, and base station offloading in extremely crowded areas, e.g., a stadium in a sports event. Note that the latter case has been identified as one of the five key scenarios that need to be effectively addressed by the fifth generation (5G) wireless systems [4].

• UAV-aided relaying, where UAVs are deployed to provide wireless connectivity between two or more distant users or user groups without reliable direct communication links, e.g., between the frontline and the command center for emergency
• UAV-aided information dissemination and data collection, where UAVs are despatched to disseminate (or collect) delay-tolerant information to (from) a large number of distributed wireless devices, e.g., wireless sensors in precision agriculture

Despite the many promising benefits, wireless communications with UAVs are also faced with several new design challenges. First, besides the normal communication links as in terrestrial systems, additional control and non-payload communications (CNPC) links with much more stringent latency and security requirements are needed in UASs for supporting safety-critical functions, such as real-time control, collision and crash avoidance, etc. This calls for more effective resource management and security mechanisms specifically designed for UAV communication systems. Besides, the high mobility environment of UASs generally results in highly dynamic network topologies, which are usually sparsely and intermittently connected ( Frew et al, 2008). As a result, effective multi-UAV coordination, or UAV swarm operations, need to be designed for ensuring reliable network connectivity [ Goddemeier et al, 2012]. At the same time, new communication protocols need to be designed taking into account the possibility of sparse and intermittent network connectivity. Another main challenge stems from the size, weight, and power (SWAP) constraints of UAVs, which could limit their communication, computation, and endurance capabilities. To tackle such issues, energy-aware UAV deployment and operation mechanisms are needed for intelligent energy usage and replenishment. Moreover, due to the mobility of UAVs as well as the lack of fixed backhual links and centralized control, interference coordination among the neighboring cells with UAV-enabled aerial base stations is more challenging than in terrestrial cellular systems. Thus, effective interference management techniques specifically designed for UAV-aided cellular coverage are needed.

The objective of this article is to give an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications. The basic networking architecture, main channel characteristics and design considerations, hardware and software design, as well as the key performance enhancing techniques that exploit the UAV’s mobility will be presented.

1.2                                          AIM AND OBJECTIVES

Drone is a typical example of unmanned aerial vehicles. The main aim of this work is to give an overview of UAV-aided with non-terrestrial network..

1.3                                   SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study provides an operational solution to directly connect drones to internet by means of 4G telecommunications and exploit drone acquired data, including telemetry and imagery but focusing on video transmission. The novelty of this work is the application of 4G connection to link the drone directly to a data server where video (in this case to monitor road traffic) and imagery (in the case of linear infrastructures) are processed.

1.4                                           SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The scope of this work is on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with wireless Communications. In this work we describe a general framework and analyze some key points, such as the hardware to use, the data stream, and the network coverage, but also the complete resulting implementation of the applied unmanned aerial system (UAS) communication system through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) featuring a long-range telemetry high-capacity video link.

1.5                                    APPLICATION OF THE STUDY

The application results in the real-time exploitation of the video, obtaining key information for traffic managers such as vehicle tracking, vehicle classification, speed estimation, and roundabout in-out matrices. The imagery downloads and storage is also performed thorough internet, although the Structure from Motion post processing is not real-time due to photogrammetric workflows.

1.6                                   LIMITATION OF STUDY

As we all know that no human effort to achieve a set of goals goes without difficulties, certain constraints were encountered in the course of carrying out this project and they are as follows:

1. Difficulty in information collection: I found it too difficult in laying hands of useful information regarding unmanned aerial vehicle cellular communications with non-terrestrial networks (NTN) and this course me to visit different libraries and internet for solution.
2. Time Constraint: The researcher will simultaneously engage in this study with other academic work. This consequently will cut down on the time devoted for the research work.

1.7                                             RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In the course of carrying this study, numerous sources were used which most of them are by visiting libraries, consulting journal and news papers and online research which Google was the major source that was used.

1.8                                     PROJECT ORGANISATION

The work is organized as follows: chapter one discuses the introductory part of the work,   chapter two presents the literature review of the study,  chapter three describes the methods applied, chapter four discusses the results of the work, chapter five summarizes the research outcomes and the recommendations.