Timeliness optimization of unmanned aerial vehicle lossy communications for internet-of-things

Information freshness is a key factor for Internet-of-Things(Io T) to make appropriate decisions and operations. This paper proposes an analytical framework for evaluating the timeliness performance of the Io T system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) lossy communications.The performance analysis consists of the outage probability analysis and the Age-of-Information(Ao I) analysis with outages. To begin with, we solve a lossy coding problem formulated from the UAV communication system, and d...     

Real-time ray-based channel generation and emulation for UAV communications

A real-time ray-based hardware emulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication channels which suits for the Three-Dimensional (3D) dynamic scenarios and considers the movements of both terminals is developed in this paper. The time-variant channel parameters, i.e., ray delay, ray gain, and ray Doppler frequency are precalculated in the host by using the Ray Tracing (RT) method. Meanwhile, RT simulation dramatically increases the number of valid rays. To address the problem of resource limitation and huge computational burden in the implementation, an efficient ray coefficients generation method based on iteration is proposed and implemented. With the advantages of low cost and high flexibility, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware platform is used to emulate the ray-based UAV channels by utilizing the compact architecture including the Time-Division (TD) scheme and Tapped-Delay Line (TDL) for channel convolution. Finally, hardware measurement results demonstrate that the properties of emulated channel, i.e., Power Delay Profile (PDP) and Doppler Power Spectrum Density (DPSD) consist with the simulated ones, which verifies the correctness of hardware implementation. The proposed channel emulator provides an efficient way for optimization, verification, and evaluation of UAV communication systems.     

无人机协同测控中SC-FDMA技术设计

针对无人机协同任务测控传输的多机接入问题,提出基于分布式任务分配模型的高动态SC-FDMA技术.通过将贪婪原则、信道动态分配机制和多用户接入技术结合,利用集中映射方式设计子信道数目可调的映射规则,配置各无人机节点所占用子载波数目.仿真结果表明,与传统FDMA、CDMA、TDMA、OFDMA等相比,基于SC-FDMA设计...     

Target localization based on cross-view matching between UAV and satellite

Matching remote sensing images taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with satellite remote sensing images with geolocation information. Thus, the specific geographic location of the target object captured by the UAV is determined. Its main challenge is the considerable differences in the visual content of remote sensing images acquired by satellites and UAVs, such as dramatic changes in viewpoint, unknown orientations, etc. Much of the previous work has focused on image matching of homologous data. To overcome the difficulties caused by the difference between these two data modes and maintain robustness in visual positioning, a quality-aware template matching method based on scale-adaptive deep convolutional features is proposed by deeply mining their common features. The template size feature map and the reference image feature map are first obtained. The two feature maps obtained are used to measure the similarity. Finally, a heat map representing the probability of matching is generated to determine the best match in the reference image. The method is applied to the latest UAV-based geolocation dataset (University-1652 dataset) and the real-scene campus data we collected with UAVs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the method.     

Green UAV communications for 6G: A survey

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have received a wide range of attention for military and commercial applications. Enhanced with communication capability, UAVs are considered to play important roles in the Sixth Generation (6G) networks due to their low cost and flexible deployment. 6G is supposed to be an all-coverage network to provide ubiquitous connections for space, air, ground and underwater. UAVs are able to provide air-borne wireless coverage flexibly, serving as aerial base stations for ground users, as relays to connect isolated nodes, or as mobile users in cellular networks. However, the onboard energy of small UAVs is extremely limited. Thus, UAVs can be only deployed to establish wireless links temporarily. Prolonging the lifetime and developing green UAV communication with low power consumption becomes a critical challenge. In this article, a comprehensive survey on green UAV communications for 6G is carried out. Specifically, the typical UAVs and their energy consumption models are introduced. Then, the typical trends of green UAV communications are provided. In addition, the typical applications of UAVs and their green designs are discussed. Finally, several promising techniques and open research issues are also pointed out.     

Design,modeling, and control of morphing aircraft:A review

A morphing aircraft can adapt its configuration to suit different types of tasks, which is also an important requirement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAV). The successful development of an unmanned morphing aircraft involves three steps that determine its ability and intelligent: configuration design, dynamic modeling and flight control. This study conducts a comprehensive survey of morphing aircraft. First, the methods to design the configuration of a morphing aircraft are presented and analyzed...     

Energy-efficient data collection for UAV-assisted IoT: Joint trajectory and resource optimization

Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. As energy-efficient operations are critical to prolong the lifetime of the energy-constrained IoT devices, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be dispatched to geographically approach the IoT clusters towards energy-efficient IoT transmissions. This paper intends to maximize the system energy efficiency by considering both the IoT transmission energy and UAV propulsion energy, where the UAV trajectory and IoT communication resources are jointly optimized. By applying large-system analysis and Dinkelbach method, the original fractional optimization is approximated and reformulated in the form of subtraction, and further a block coordinate descent framework is employed to update the UAV trajectory and IoT communication resources iteratively. Extensive simulation results are provided to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Contributions to data transmission at critical moments on unmanned aerial vehicles

As for unmanned aircraft, the knowledge of the aircraft performance is directly related with the navigation, guidance, and control system programming. Therefore, the measured data in each phase of the flight must be sufficiently precise to obtain a good characterization of aircraft. This article proposes new methods of sending information to ground, which make it possible to know the aircraft behavior accurately, and for this purpose, four contributions have been made for ALO (Avión Ligero de Observación, Spanish acronym for Light Observation Aircraft). Currently, the characterization is based on data obtained at ten samples per second, insufficient to acquire detailed knowledge of what happened during the whole flight of an aircraft. As a result of these contributions, many more samples per second of accelerations and angular velocities are obtained at the most critical moments of the flight, such as takeoff or landing. Among the improvements included are data compression techniques, providing references to locate the measured data in time and identifying labels of each parameter.     

Distortion minimization for multimedia transmission in NOMA HAP-UAV integrated aerial access networks

Aerial access networks have been envisioned as a promising 6G solution to enhance the ground communication systems in both coverage and capacity. To better utilize the spectrum and fully explore different channel characteristics, this paper constructs an integrated network comprising the High Altitude Platform (HAP) and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) with the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technology. In order to improve the transmission quality of images and videos, a power management scheme is proposed to minimize the distortion of the transmissions from the HAP and UAVs to the terminals. The power control is formulated as a non-convex problem constrained by the maximal transmit power and the minimal terminal rate requirements. The variable substitution and the first-order Tailor’s expansion is used to transform it into a sequence of convex problems, which are subsequently solved through the gradient projection method. Simulation demonstrates the signal distortion and error rate improvement achieved by the proposed algorithm.     

一种超视距组网无人机载通信系统设计

针对超视距集群作业需求，提出将Ka频段高通量卫星技术与TD-LTE协议区域组网技术相结合，构建一种“1+N”架构的无人机载测控通信系统。通过方案介绍，阐述了卫星、组网、载荷等模块的设计思路、方案选型及实物设计结果，明确核心单元特点。详细论述了异构网络通信、平滑低延时传输、信源加密等关键技术，并完成链路余量计算、带宽时延测试及飞行试验。试验结果表明：系统任意终端间双向通信稳定可靠，方案设计合理可行。相比于卫星、组网单模通信方式，系统在长航距集群测控、任务协同、临场机动及应用资费等方面具有明显优势，为后续构建空天一体化多平台支撑通信系统，提供工程实践参考。