Mobility Support for Cellular Connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Performance and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges and performance of cellular networks supporting UAVs at various altitudes, analyzing how mobility and radio environment changes impact connectivity and proposing potential improvements.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of radio environment changes with altitude and evaluates mobility performance of cellular-connected UAVs, highlighting challenges and potential enhancements.

Findings

Radio environment varies significantly with altitude.

Mobility performance degrades at higher altitudes.

Potential improvements can enhance UAV connectivity.

Abstract

Beyond visual line-of-sight connectivity is key for use cases of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and rescue missions. Cellular networks stand ready to support flying UAVs by providing wide-area, quality, and secure connectivity for UAV operations. Ensuring reliable connections in the presence of UAV movements is important for safety control and operations of UAVs. With increasing height above the ground, the radio environment changes. Using terrestrial cellular networks to provide connectivity to the UAVs moving in the sky may face new challenges. In this article, we share some of our findings in mobility support for cellular connected UAVs. We first identify how the radio environment changes with altitude and analyze the corresponding implications on mobility performance. We then present evaluation results to shed light on the mobility performance of cellular connected UAVs. We also discuss potential enhancements for improving mobility performance in the sky.