Survey on Neighbor Discovery and Beam Alignment in mmWave-Enabled UAV Swarm Networks

TL;DR

This survey reviews neighbor discovery and beam alignment methods for mmWave UAV swarm networks, addressing challenges like mobility, beam misalignment, and high path loss to improve communication reliability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of existing techniques and discusses open issues and future research directions in mmWave UAV swarm communication.

Findings

Existing techniques vary in effectiveness for high-mobility UAVs

Beam alignment is critical for maintaining reliable links

Open challenges include mobility management and interference mitigation

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave)-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm networks (UAVSNs) can utilize a large spectrum of resources to provide low latency and high data transmission rate. Additionally, owing to the short wavelength, UAVs equipped with large antenna arrays can form secure narrow directive beam to establish communication with less interference. However, due to the high UAV mobility, limited beam coverage, beam misalignment, and high path loss, it is very challenging to adopt the mmWave communication in UAVSNs. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on neighbor discovery and beam alignment techniques for directional communication in mmWave-enabled UAVSNs. The existing techniques are reviewed and compared with each other. We also discuss key open issues and challenges with potential research direction.