MIMO Relaying UAVs Operating in Public Safety Scenarios

Joseanne Viana,Rui Dinis,Francisco Cercas,Pedro Sebastião,Américo Correia

doi:10.3390/drones5020032

Joseanne Viana, Rui Dinis + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/drones5020032

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Abstract

Methods to implement communication in natural and humanmade disasters have been widely discussed in the scientific community. Scientists believe that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relays will play a critical role in 5G public safety communications (PSC) due to their technical superiority. They have several significant advantages: a high degree of mobility, flexibility, exceptional line of sight, and real-time adaptative planning. For instance, cell edge coverage could be extended using relay UAVs. This paper summarizes the sidelink evolution in the 3GPP standardization associated with the usage of the device to device (D2D) techniques that use long term evolution (LTE) communication systems, potential extensions for 5G, and a study on the impact of circular mobility on relay UAVs using the software network simulator 3 (NS3). In this simulation, the transmitted packet percentage was evaluated where the speed of the UAV for users was changed. This paper also examines the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication applied to drones and proposes a new trajectory to assist users experiencing unfortunate circumstances. The overall communication is highly dependent on the drone speed and the use of MIMO and suitable antennas may influence overall transmission between users and the UAVs relay. When the UAVs relaying speed was configured at 108 km/h the total transmission rate was reduced to 55% in the group with 6 users allocated to each drone.

Highlights

Public safety communication services often utilize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a suitable tool during unfortunate events such as landslides, mountain collapses, and road accidents due to the full line of sight (LoS) probability when flying above a given height as the 3GPP Release 15 presents [1,2]
According to Bekkouche et al [5], UAVs can contribute to enhancing user services in heterogeneous radio access networks (RANs) as a relay (Figure 1), as Wi-Fi connected to a backhaul, as a small cell and/or base station to provide coverage extension, and as storage in delay tolerant networks for late forwarding
One communication tool that is possibly applicable in public safety scenarios is the new radio sidelink (SL), a device to device (D2D) protocol introduced in the 3GPP Release 16 [25] that assists vehicle to everything communications (V2X) and provides road safety services under the Ultra-Reliable low latency communications paradigm (URLLC)

Summary

Introduction

Public safety communication services often utilize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a suitable tool during unfortunate events such as landslides, mountain collapses, and road accidents due to the full line of sight (LoS) probability when flying above a given height as the 3GPP Release 15 presents [1,2]. UAVs show superiority in comparison to existing terrestrial base stations in terms of convenient deployment for covering dead zones, easy control, coverage area adaptation, and flexibility in network reconfiguration [3]. These advantages made the European Union constitute the U-Space program to legislate UAV’s integration into their aircraft system. According to Bekkouche et al [5], UAVs can contribute to enhancing user services in heterogeneous radio access networks (RANs) as a relay (Figure 1), as Wi-Fi connected to a backhaul, as a small cell and/or base station to provide coverage extension, and as storage in delay tolerant networks for late forwarding.

Sidelink Communications

UAV in D2D Communication Using MIMO

System Model

Results

Conclusions

Future Work