UAV Assisted Cellular Communications

Dedicated UAVs can be used as communication platforms in the way as wireless access points or relays nodes, to further assist the terrestrial communications. This type of applications can be referred to as UAV assisted cellular communications. UAV assisted cellular communications have numerous use cases, including traffic offloading, wireless backhauling, swift service recovery after natural disasters, emergency response, rescue and search, information dissemination/broadcasting, and data collection from ground sensors for machine-type communications. However, different from traditional cellular networks, how to plan the time-variant placements of the UAVs served as BS/relay is very challenging due to the complicated 3D propagation environments as well as many other practical constraints such as power and flying speed. In addition, spectrum sharing with existing cellular networks is another interesting topic to investigate.