The rapid growth of consumer Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is creating promising new business opportunities for cellular operators. On the one hand, UAVs can be connected to cellular networks as new types of user equipment, therefore generating significant revenues for the operators that can guarantee their stringent service requirements. On the other hand, UAVs offer the unprecedented opportunity to realize UAVmounted flying base stations that can dynamically reposition themselves to boost coverage, spectral efficiency, and user quality of experience. Indeed, the standardization bodies are currently exploring possibilities for serving commercial UAVs with cellular networks. Industries are beginning to trial early prototypes of flying base stations or user equipments, while academia is in full swing researching mathematical and algorithmic solutions to address interesting new problems arising from flying nodes in cellular networks. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of all of these developments promoting smooth integration of UAVs into cellular networks. Specifically, we survey (i) the types of consumer UAVs currently available off-the-shelf, (ii) the interference issues and potential solutions addressed by standardization bodies for serving aerial users with the existing terrestrial base stations, (iii) the challenges and opportunities for assisting cellular communications with UAV-based flying relays and base stations, (iv) the ongoing prototyping and test bed activities, (v) the new regulations being developed to manage the commercial use of UAVs, and (vi) the cyber-physical security of UAV-assisted cellular communications.

The purpose of this article is to bestow the reader with a timely study of UAV cellular communications, bridging the gap between the 3GPP standardization status quo and the more forward-looking research. Special emphasis is placed on the downlink command and control (C&C) channel to aerial users, whose reliability is deemed of paramount technological importance for the commercial success of UAV cellular communications. Through a realistic side-by-side comparison of two network deployments -a present-day cellular infrastructure versus a next-generation massive MIMO system -a plurality of key facts are cast light upon, with the three main ones summarized as follows: (i) UAV cell selection is essentially driven by the secondary lobes of a base station's radiation pattern, causing UAVs to associate to far-flung cells; (ii) over a 10 MHz bandwidth, and for UAV heights of up to 300 m, massive MIMO networks can support 100 kbps C&C channels in 74% of the cases when the uplink pilots for channel estimation are reused among base station sites, and in 96% of the cases without pilot reuse across the network; (iii) supporting UAV C&C channels can considerably affect the performance of ground users on account of severe pilot contamination, unless suitable power control policies are in place.

Wi-Fi technology is continuously innovating to cater to the growing customer demands, driven by the digitalisation of everything, both in the home as well as the enterprise and hotspot spaces. In this article, we introduce to the wireless community the next generation Wi-Fi-based on IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT)-, present the main objectives and timelines of this new 802.11be amendment, thoroughly describe its main candidate features and enhancements, and cover the important issue of coexistence with other wireless technologies. We also provide simulation results to assess the potential throughput gains brought by 802.11be with respect to 802.11ax.1 Other quality of service key performance indicators may apply depending of the service nature.

In this paper we revisit hybrid analog-digital precoding systems with emphasis on their modelling and radio-frequency (RF) losses, to realistically evaluate their benefits in 5G system implementations.For this, we decompose the analog beamforming networks (ABFN) as a bank of commonly used RF components and formulate realistic model constraints based on their S-parameters. Specifically, we concentrate on fully-connected ABFN (FC-ABFN) and Butler networks for implementing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in the RF domain. The results presented in this paper reveal that the performance and energy efficiency of hybrid precoding systems are severely affected, once practical factors are considered in the overall design. In this context, we also show that Butler RF networks are capable of providing better performances than FC-ABFN for systems with a large number of RF chains. Index TermsAnalog beamforming networks, hybrid precoding, millimeter wave, massive MIMO, Butler matrix.

In this paper, we explore low-complexity transmission in physically-constrained massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by means of channel state information (CSI) relaxation. In particular, we propose a strategy to take advantage of the correlation experienced by the channels of neighbour antennas when deployed in tightly packed antenna arrays. The proposed scheme is based on collecting CSI for only a subset of antennas during the pilot training stage and, subsequently, using averages of the acquired CSI for the remaining closely-spaced antennas. By doing this, the total number of radio frequency (RF) chains, for both CSI acquisition and data transmission, and the baseband signal processing are reduced, hence simplifying the overall system operation. At the same time, this impacts the quality of the channel estimation produced after the CSI acquisition process. To characterize this tradeoff, we explore the impact that the number of antennas with instantaneous CSI has on the performance, signal processing complexity, and energy efficiency of time-division duplex (TDD) systems. The analytical and simulation results presented in this paper show that the application of the proposed strategy in size-constrained antenna arrays is able to significantly enhance the energy efficiency against systems with full CSI availability, while approximately preserving their average performance.