Crowd‐sourced and incentive driven UAV system to assist with network slices

Abstract

Owing to their flexibility, fast deployment, increasing affordability, and numerous application opportunities, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) became an undisputed target of studies and research to discover and exploit the immense opportunities they provide. Moreover, network slicing is a critical enabler for 5G and beyond. Network slices guarantee certain network user expectations such as data rate and latency thresh‐holds. There is no doubt that crowd‐sourced and incentive driven solutions are on the rise. Crowd‐sourcing allowed companies and organizations both small and large to gather data and perform other large‐scale tasks with minimum expenses and maintenance. Indeed, the major concerns for 5G and network slicing are guaranteeing high throughput, reliability, and latency. With data rates being the most important attribute for common regular users, that is, mobile devices, video streaming, navigation, and content consumption. As a result, the focus of this work is to utilize crowd‐sourced UAVs in an incentive driven network slice assistance system to extend coverage and provide mobile users with the high throughput they require. This work presents some basic 5G cellular radio access technologies and network slicing background and proposes a novel system, namely UAV slice assistance (UAVSA), and its hybrid alternative version: UAV hybrid slice assistance (UAVHSA). The hybrid mode combines benefits from the proposed UAVSA system and the traditional base station (BS) system. The proposed algorithms address the issue of coverage and guaranteeing high data rate slices for users. The proposed systems maximize satisfaction rate of network slice users. Moreover, all systems are extensively tested and compared in various scenarios to determine their performance and provide a coherent study. Finally, future works and opportunities are highlighted in conclusion.