Enhanced Cellular Support for UAVs with Massive MIMO

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important new class of users in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G cellular networks. In particular, there are emerging UAV applications such as aerial photograph and data relaying that require high-speed communications between the UAVs and the ground base stations (GBSs). Due to the high UAV altitude, the strong line-of-sight (LoS) links generally dominate the channels between the UAVs and GBSs, which brings both opportunities and challenges in the design of future wireless networks supporting both terrestrial and aerial users. Although each UAV can associate with more GBSs for communication as compared to terrestrial users thanks to the LoS-dominant channels, it also causes/suffers more severe interference to/from the terrestrial communications in the uplink/downlink. This paper studies the uplink communication from a multi-antenna UAV to a set of GBSs within its signal coverage by considering a practical yet challenging scenario when the number of antennas at the UAV is smaller than that of co-channel GBSs. To achieve high-rate transmission yet avoid interfering with any of the existing terrestrial communications at the co-channel GBSs, we propose a novel multi-beam transmission strategy by exploiting the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. Specifically, the UAV sends each data stream to a selected subset of the GBSs, which can decode the UAV's signals and then cancel them before decoding the messages of their served terrestrial users, and in the meanwhile nulls its interference at the other GBSs via zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. To draw essential insight, we first characterize in closed-form the degrees-of-freedom (DoF) under the proposed strategy. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to maximize the UAV's transmit rate subject to the interference avoidance constraints for protecting the terrestrial users.

In this paper, we propose a secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mobile edge computing (MEC) system where multiple ground users offload large computing tasks to a nearby legitimate UAV in the presence of multiple eavesdropping UAVs with imperfect locations. To enhance security, jamming signals are transmitted from both the full-duplex legitimate UAV and non-offloading ground users. For this system, we design a low-complexity iterative algorithm to maximize the minimum secrecy capacity subject to latency, minimum offloading and total power constraints. Specifically, we jointly optimize the UAV location, users' transmit power, UAV jamming power, offloading ratio, UAV computing capacity, and offloading user association. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms baseline strategies over a wide range of UAV self-interference (SI) efficiencies, locations and packet sizes of ground users. Furthermore, we show that there exists a fundamental tradeoff between the security and latency of UAV-enabled MEC systems which depends on the UAV SI efficiency and total UAV power constraints.

In this article, a 3-D geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) is proposed for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) channels. The proposed model is the first mmWave massive MIMO UAV two-cylinder GBSM that enables to jointly model the channel space-time-frequency non-stationarity by a novel variable parameter-based method. In this novel method, key parameters of UAV channels are assumed to vary in space, time, and frequency domains, and the effect of the unique UAV-related parameters is further taken into account, such as the UAV’s altitude, velocity, and moving directions. Based on the proposed model, some statistical properties are derived, including the time-variant transfer function (TVTF), space-time-frequency correlation function (STF-CF), Doppler power spectral density (PSD), and the standard deviation of Doppler frequency on antenna arrays. Simulation results show that the channel non-stationarity in space, time, and frequency domains can be captured, and the aforementioned UAV channel-related parameters have a great impact on channel statistics. Finally, the utility of the proposed model is validated by the excellent agreement between simulation results and measurements.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have drawn significant research interests. Meanwhile, cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is proposed as a promising technology to achieve the ultimate performance limits. In this paper, we investigate the UAV communication with wireless power transfer (WPT) aided CF massive MIMO systems, where the harvested energy (HE) from the downlink WPT is used to support both uplink data and pilot transmission. Take hardware impairments of UAV into account, novel closed-form downlink HE and uplink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions are derived. UAV communications with small cell (SC) and cellular massive MIMO enabled WPT systems are also considered for comparison. Our results reveal that CF massive MIMO achieves two and four times higher 95%-likely uplink SE than the ones of SC and cellular massive MIMO, respectively. To this end, SE is a concave function of the time-splitting fraction, and the optimal time-splitting fraction for maximizing SE is determined by the altitude and hardware impairment factor of the UAV.

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base station plays a significant role in enhancing the terrestrial network, when the ground base station (GBS) is destroyed in emergent cases or its load exceeds the capacity of the terrestrial network. Presently, many papers focus on optimizing the UAV position deployment and user access, while ignoring the optimization about the spectrum resource management. To solve this problem, we formulate a joint optimization problem of the spectrum resource management and the position placement for UAVs with the constraint of the limited backhaul capacity. Later, the joint optimization problem is modeled as a hierarchical game decision architecture comprised of a UAV position placement game and a spectrum resource management game. Further, we analyze the equilibrium property of the two games and propose two best response- (BR) based optimization algorithms to reach the Nash Equilibriums (NEs) of the two games, respectively. Specifically, the proposed algorithm about the UAV deployment considers the variable granularity local exploration and global random exploration. Simulation results show that the proposed UAV deployment algorithm can improve the total throughput by 7% and 20% at least in comparison with the K-means deployment algorithm and the fixed granularity exploration algorithm, respectively.

Wireless communication is an essential technology to unlock the full potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in numerous applications and has thus received unprecedented attention recently. Although technologies such as direct link, WiFi, and satellite communications are still useful in some remote scenarios where cellular services are unavailable, it is believed that exploiting the thriving 5G and beyond cellular networks to support UAV communications is the most promising and cost-effective approach, especially when the number of UAVs grows dramatically. On the one hand, to guarantee safe and efficient flight operations of multiple UAVs, it is of paramount importance to provide secure and ultra-reliable communication links between the UAVs and their ground pilots or control stations for conveying command and control signals, especially in beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) scenarios. On the other hand, because of advances in communication equipment miniaturization as well as UAV manufacturing, mounting compact and lightweight base stations (BSs) or relays on UAVs becomes increasingly feasible. This has led to two promising research paradigms for UAV communications, namely, UAV-assisted cellular communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into cellular networks as aerial communication platforms and aerial users, respectively. As such, integrating UAVs into cellular networks is believed to be a win-win technology for both UAV-related industries and cellular network operators, which not only creates plenty of new business opportunities but also benefits the communication performance of 3-D wireless networks. In addition, UAV related sensing and computing are also helpful for achieving efficient and reliable communication (e.g., in avoiding coverage holes) as well as smart UAV coordination, positioning, and trajectory design. However, 5G and beyond wireless networks with UAVs significantly differs from traditional communication systems, because of the high altitude and high maneuverability of UAVs, the unique UAV-ground channels, the diversified quality of service (QoS) requirements for downlink command and control (C&C) and uplink mission-related data transmission, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the new design degrees of freedom enabled by joint UAV mobility control and communication resource allocation.

Due to the increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with generally limited battery power, energy-efficient data transmission schemes with massive connectivity capabilities are required for future wireless networks. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique that provides such massive connectivity by allowing superposed data transmission of multiple users over the same resource block. This article presents a user pairing and power allocation technique for energy efficiency and Quality-of-Service (QoS)-based NOMA transmission for cellular-connected mobile UAVs and ground users (GUs) in a NOMA UAV network. The aim is to minimize the energy consumption of both aerial users (AUs) and GUs during uplink data transmission and guarantee their required transmission rates through efficient pairing and power optimization. Therefore, a joint pairing and power optimization problem is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem under QoS constraints. Furthermore, a suboptimal solution is proposed to show that the proposed energy-efficient pairing technique effectively fulfills the QoS requirements of both GUs and AUs in a network with low complexity. The simulation results of the proposed technique show the performance gain in terms of energy efficiency, outage probability, and pairing complexity compared to the conventional channel condition and power-consumption-based NOMA pairing and power allocation techniques.

In this chapter, the regulation of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication network is investigated in the presence of dynamic changes in the UAV lineup and user distribution. We target an optimal UAV control policy which is capable of identifying the upcoming change in the UAV lineup (quit or join-in) or user distribution, and proactively relocating the UAVs ahead of the change rather than passively dispatching the UAVs after the change. Specifically, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based UAV control framework is developed to maximize the accumulated user satisfaction (US) score for a given time horizon which is able to handle the change in both the UAV lineup and user distribution. The framework accommodates the changed dimension of the state-action space before and after the UAV lineup change by deliberate state transition design. In addition, to handle the continuous state and action space, deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, which is an actor-critic based DRL method, is exploited. Furthermore, to promote learning exploration around the timing of the change, the original DDPG scheme is adapted into an asynchronous parallel computing (APC) structure which leads to better training performance in both the critic and actor networks. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the convergence of the proposed learning approach, and demonstrate its capability in jointly handling the dynamics in UAV lineup and user distribution as well as its superiority over a passive reaction method.KeywordsUnmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)UAV-based communication networksDeep reinforcement learningDynamic user spatial distributionUAV trajectory design

This chapter, the techniques of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and network MIMO are studied. First, massive MIMO is compared with the conventional point-to-point MIMO used in current cellular systems in terms of capacity and energy efficiency. The comparison shows that massive MIMO has huge gains even under the modest conditions using simple linear processing. Then, the implementation of massive MIMO is discussed by focusing on the channel estimation method, the signal detection method and the precoding method. Following this, several main issues in massive MIMO are examined and relevant measures are discussed. Finally, network MIMO is studied by introducing cooperation between base stations to completely remove the inter-cell interference, at the cost of even higher complexity that places limits on the backhaul and fronthaul links.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as aerial wireless base stations when cellular networks go down. Prior studies on UAV-based wireless coverage typically consider downlink scenarios from an aerial base station to ground users. In this paper, we consider an uplink scenario under disaster situations (such as earthquakes or floods), when cellular networks are down. We formulate the placement problem of UAVs, where the objective is to determine the locations of a set of UAVs that maximize the time duration of uplink transmission until the first wireless device runs out of energy. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. Due to its intractability, we start by restricting the number of UAVs to be one. We show that under this special case the problem can be formulated as a convex optimization problem under a restriction on the coverage angle of the ground users. After that, we propose a gradient projection-based algorithm to find the optimal location of the UAV. Based on this, we then develop an efficient algorithm for the general case of multiple UAVs. The proposed algorithm starts by clustering the wireless devices into several clusters where each cluster being served by one UAV. After it finishes clustering the wireless devices, it applies the gradient projection-based algorithm in each cluster. We also formulate the problem of minimizing the number of UAVs required to serve the ground users such that the time duration of uplink transmission of each wireless device is greater than or equal to a threshold value. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and propose to use two efficient methods to determine the minimum number of UAVs required to serve the wireless devices. We validate the analysis by simulations and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms under different cases.

The ever-increasing applications enabled by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) calls for high-rate and ultra-reliable two-way wireless communication between UAVs and their associated ground entities. Integrating UAVs into cellular networks is regarded as a promising approach to meet such goals. However, given the unique UAV-ground channel characteristics and the fact that the existing cellular network has been mainly designed to serve ground users, it is not immediately clear whether the new aerial users can be supported in a similar manner as the ground users. In this paper, we provide the performance analysis for cellular-connected UAVs based on stochastic geometry, by studying the association probability and signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) with two different association policies, namely nearest-distance based and maximum-power based associations. One striking difference of our work as compared to most existing analytical works is the use of the practical three dimensional (3D) antenna model at the base stations specified by 3GPP, which is important for more accurate performance analysis with UAV users of much higher altitude. Some useful observations are obtained based on our theoretical analysis and numerical results.

Free-space optical (FSO) communication is expected to play an indispensable role with high data rates and low system complexity in beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks. However, infrequent adverse weather conditions can incapacitate its performance. The combination of FSO and radio frequency (RF) has emerged as an effective alternative for meeting the growing need for high data rates in wireless communication networks. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also anticipated to play an instrumental role in B5G networks due to their flexible movement and deployment. In this paper, a UAV-aided hybrid FSO/RF backhauling system using a matching game theory (GT) and reinforcement learning (RL) framework is investigated. We deploy a UAV to provide a user offloading service to an already existing ground base station (GBS), which is facing a reduced backhaul capacity due to weather attenuation (e.g., fog). It is considered that the GBS has a pre-installed FSO backhaul connection to a macro-base station (MBS). However, during adverse weather conditions, the FSO backhaul is severely affected, compromising the reliability of the FSO link. With the reduced FSO backhaul capacity, the GBS needs an additional backhaul link to support its backhaul data transmission to the destination MBS. As a result, instead of building an expensive permanent parallel RF link for the rare foggy situation, a UAV can be hired to serve a portion of the users, thereby reducing the GBS load. The users perform a matching game-based procedure to select the base station (BS) of their choice to maximize their utility. The UAV is deployed at an optimal altitude, and the bandwidth partition between the GBS and the UAV is optimized to maximize the system throughput using RL. Real weather data from the cities of Edinburgh and London in the U.K. are used to evaluate the performance of the system. The numerical results show the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to conventional methods.

In this paper, we investigate a UAV-assisted communication system based on data caching at the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In the network, two ground users (GUs) request data stored in a local station (LS). However, direct links from the LS to the GUs are assumed to be unavailable due to unexpected or emergency circumstances such as natural disasters or complex terrains. Herein, a UAV is dispatched to cache the data in the LS and then transmit data to the two GUs by using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. In order to address the energy limitation issue, energy harvesting is applied in which the UAV can prolong its operation time by harvesting solar energy from the ambient environment. Besides, the UAV is assumed to move along a circular trajectory around a fixed center. We consider a joint caching and resource allocation algorithm to deal with the Markov decision process problem for maximizing the long-term data transmission rate of the system. In particular, we propose a novel scheme based on value iteration-based dynamic programming to obtain the optimal policy in which the UAV can allocate an optimal transmission power for the GUs in each time slot. The simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Recently, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is considered as a promising technology to significantly improve the spectral and energy efficiency of fifth generation (5G) networks. Massive MIMO increases the energy efficiency (EE) by three orders of magnitude as compared to single antenna systems. In this paper, we review and analyze energy efficient resource allocation techniques for massive MIMO system. To this end, the energy efficiency of massive massive MIMO with linear processing is formulated. Analytical formulation is provided for the spectral efficiency (SE) and total system power consumption model. The tradeoff on the spectral and energy efficiency is analyzed. The impacts of propagation and system parameters on the SE-EE tradeoff are investigated. Then, large scale fading based analytical approximation for the energy efficiency is formulated. Finally, numerical simulation is done to validate the theoretical analysis.

We study support for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications through a cell-freemassive MIMO architecture, wherein a large number of access points (APs) is deployed in place of largeco-located massive MIMO arrays. We consider also a variation of the pure cell-free architecture by applyinga user-centric association approach, where each user is served only from a subset of APs in the network.Under the general assumption that the propagation channel between the mobile stations, either UAVs orground users (GUEs), and the APs follows a Ricean distribution, we derive closed form spectral efficiencylower bounds for uplink and downlink with linear minimum mean square error channel estimation. Weconsider several power allocation and user scheduling strategies for such a system, and, among these,also minimum-rate maximizing power allocation strategies to improve the system fairness. Our numericalresults reveal that cell-free massive MIMO architecture and its low-complexity user-centric alternativemay provide better performance than a traditional multi-cell massive MIMO network deployment.