Page - 10 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

Wireless Communications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): From Wi-Fi to 5G Evgenii VINOGRADOV 1 and Sofie POLLIN KU Leuven, Department of Electrical Engineering - ESAT, Leuven Belgium Abstract. The growing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for various applications requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity for safe control and data exchange between these devices and ground terminals. Depending on the application, UAV-mounted wireless equipment can either be an aerial user equipment (AUE) that co-exists with the terrestrial users, or it can be a part of wireless infrastructure providing a range of services to the ground users. For instance, AUE can be used for real-time search and rescue and Aerial Base Station (ABS) can enhance coverage, capacity, and energy efficiency of wireless networks. We will start with discussing the open challenges of communication with UAVs. To give answers to the posed questions, we will focus on the UAV communication basics, providing the channel modeling background and giving guidelines on how various channel models should be used. Next, theoretical, simulation- and measurement-based approaches to address the key challenges for AUE usage will be presented. Moreover, we will provide a comprehensive overview on how UAV- mounted equipment (e.g. ABS) can be used as a part of the communication network. Based on the theoretical analysis, we will show how various network parameters (for example coverage area of ABSs, power efficiency, or user localization error) can be optimized. Finally, we will discuss how to ensure the safe use of UAVs via various RF-based techniques for detecting the presence of UAVs in the airspace (including Machine Learning and Passive Coherent Location techniques). Keywords. UAV, channel modeling, air-to-ground channel, aerial communication, 5G, mmWave, cellular 1. Tutorial Focus 1.1. Objectives The main goal of this tutorial is to give a complete overview of the main scenarios (aerial user equipment (AUE) and aerial base station (ABS)), channel and performance models, compare them, and discuss open research points. This tutorial for wireless communication with UAVs will give a comprehensive overview of the research done until now and depicts a comprehensive picture to foster new ideas and solutions while avoiding duplication of past works. The participants will learn: • the main air-to-ground and air-to-air channel modeling approaches and how to choose the appropriate model according to the targeted goal, • the theoretical, simulation and measurement based approaches to estimate the performance of UAV-enabled communication networks for multiple frequency bands, 1 Corresponding Author E-mail: Evgenii.vinogradov@kuleuven.be. Intelligent Environments 2019 A. Muñoz et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/AISE190015 10