Toward Low-Altitude Airspace Management and UAV Operations: Requirements, Architecture and Enabling Technologies

TL;DR

This paper proposes UTICN, a unified cellular-native architecture integrating sensing, positioning, communication, and management technologies to address challenges in low-altitude airspace and UAV operations, demonstrated through city-level and collaborative systems.

Contribution

It introduces UTICN, a novel integrated architecture with key technologies for low-altitude airspace management and UAV operations, bridging existing fragmentation.

Findings

UTICN is feasible for city-level LAE management.

Demonstrated multi-frequency collaborative ISAC system.

Provides a foundational framework for LAE airspace management.

Abstract

The low-altitude economy (LAE) is rapidly advancing toward intelligence, connectivity, and coordination, bringing new challenges in dynamic airspace management, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operation, and security management. Existing systems remain fragmented and lack effective coordination. To bridge these gaps, we propose UTICN (Ubiquitous and Trusted Intelligent Cellular-native Network) for LAE, a unified cellular-native architecture that integrates multi-domain sensing, high-precision positioning, intelligent aircraft-to-everything communication, dynamic airspace management, and UAV operational services. UTICN introduces key technologies such as integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), passive and active positioning, intelligent machine communication, swarm coordination, and control-data decoupled management frameworks. We demonstrate UTICN's feasibility through two use cases, i.e., a city-level LAE management platform and a multi-frequency collaborative ISAC system. This work provides a fundamental reference for building a unified operational foundation and airspace management architecture for the LAE.