Taming Aerial Communication with Flight-assisted Smart Surfaces in 6G Era

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces on aerial platforms like UAVs and HAPs to enhance 6G communication, addressing challenges and proposing innovative solutions for future aerial communication systems.

Contribution

It introduces novel RIS-based use-cases and discusses their requirements and potential solutions for aerial communication in the 6G era.

Findings

RIS can control the propagation environment from elevated viewpoints

RIS-based solutions can reduce control overhead and battery consumption

Potential applications include surveillance, delivery, and emergency connectivity

Abstract

Aerial communication is gradually taking an assertive role within common societal behaviors by means of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), high-altitude platforms (HAPs), and fixed-wing aircrafts (FWAs). Such devices can assist general operations in a diverse set of heterogeneous applications, such as video-surveillance, remote delivery and connectivity provisioning in crowded events and emergency scenarios. Given their increasingly higher technology penetration rate, telco operators started looking at the sky as a new potential direction to enable a three-dimensional (3D) communication paradigm. However, designing flying mobile stations involves addressing a daunting number of challenges, such as an excessive on-board control overhead, variable battery drain and advanced antenna design. To this end, the newly-born Smart Surfaces technology may come to help: reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) may be flexibly installed on-board to control the terrestrial propagation environment from an elevated viewpoint by involving low-complex and battery-limited solutions. In this paper, we shed light on novel RIS-based use-cases, corresponding requirements, and potential solutions that might be adopted in future aerial communication infrastructures.