Cognitive Communication Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operation

Abstract

An intelligent and agile wireless communication scheme is a key factor in provision of efficient air-to-ground (A2G) communication for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operations. For this purpose we review and propose an architecture for aeronautical cognitive communication system (ACCS) that will be providing command, control and communication (C3) link between ground control stations (GCSs) and multiple UAVs utilizing cognitive radio (CR) concept. The factors reviewed and accounted for in the design process are the topology of cognitive detectors, connectivity between cognitive detector and control agency, connection with unmanned traffic management (UTM) system, data link requirements imposed by cognitive scheme, failure notification and recovery, etc. The proposed ACCS is suitable for supporting UAV operations and features a distributed non-communication architecture consisting of GCS network in the ground zone, hybrid data link with the static uplink and the flexible downlink, demonstrating a dynamic nature overall with the frequency handoff scheme generated periodically in accordance with current spectrum environment.

Dynamic Spectrum Management with Network Function Virtualization for UAV Communication

“…The few existing works related to sharing spectrum resources with UAVs, especially with the interweave method, allow UAVs to access spectrum resources opportunistically [66]. Recently, the concept of using the centralized spectrum allocation scheme for the UAV communication is proposed in [9], which is similar with our previous work in [83]. However, both works do not consider the actual deployment of GCSs, as well as huge computation loads in GCSs.…”

“…In aeronautical communications, the authors in [94] presented a framework in which spectrum resources are originally allocated to nodes to ensure resource utilization efficiency. We previously investigated a cognitive-enabled DSM communication scheme for the UAV A2G link where both spectrum awareness and decision making are performed terrestrially and uploaded to the airborne system [83]. However, the above works did not consider the limitation in processing and storing large quantities of spectrum data, especially when monitoring the spectrum over a wide bandwidth.…”

“…Enabled with DSM, the spectrum resources can be improved efficiently by way of generating the optimized communication schemes to be accustomed to the changeable RF environment. Some functions are enabled with the DSM, such as the collaborative communication [13], regulated communication behavior [94], and frequency hopping [83]. However, with the centralized DSM schemes [94], the construction of terrestrial infrastructures is one challenge given the temporal and spatial characteristic of spectrum resources for different areas, and high computation when processing and allocating spectrum resources.…”

“…Oriented from the dynamic spectrum sharing structures [13,83,94], this paper proposes to integrate the NFV with the GCSs deployment where the central allocation scheme is employed to serve the UAV operations. The GCSs are formed as VNs.…”

Modeling and Performance Analysis of Opportunistic Link Selection for UAV Communication

“…Dynamic spectrum allocation or assignment schemes for the spectrum sharing is extensively studied especially under the TV bands [ 13 ]. The spectrum allocation can be grouped into two categories, i.e., the central authority based structure and distributed structure [ 14 ]. The centralized communication networks require a coordinator and are enabled with an exclusive common control channel for delivering the access or the scheduling model.…”