# UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends

## TL;DR

This paper surveys recent advances in UAV communications for 5G and beyond, highlighting their unique attributes, technical challenges, and future research directions in integrated wireless networks.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of UAV-based 5G techniques across multiple domains and discusses open research problems and future trends.

## Key findings

- UAVs offer flexible deployment and strong LoS links for 5G.
- Various UAV-based 5G techniques are categorized by domain.
- Numerous open research challenges are identified for future work.

## Abstract

Providing ubiquitous connectivity to diverse device types is the key challenge for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important component of the upcoming wireless networks that can potentially facilitate wireless broadcast and support high rate transmissions. Compared to the communications with fixed infrastructure, UAV has salient attributes, such as flexible deployment, strong line-of-sight (LoS) connection links, and additional design degrees of freedom with the controlled mobility. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on UAV communication towards 5G/B5G wireless networks is presented. We first briefly introduce essential background and the space-air-ground integrated networks, as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. We then provide an exhaustive review of various 5G techniques based on UAV platforms, which we categorize by different domains including physical layer, network layer, and joint communication, computing and caching. In addition, a great number of open research problems are outlined and identified as possible future research directions.