Suitability of LTE for Drone-to-Infrastructure Communications in Very Low Level Airspace

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Kurzfassung

The increasing availability of cheap and powerful drones for various applications is likely to cause a heavy usage of the very low level airspace in metropolitan areas with up to 500 simultaneously airborne drones per square kilometer in the near future. Certainly, the predicted large number of drones presents a major challenge to future UTM and especially to supporting communications systems. A robust and reliable communications system for drone-to-infrastructure communications is inevitably needed to grant all drones access to various services provided by UTM. In previous works, it has already been shown that LTE is capable of providing connectivity to drones flying at low altitudes in principle. However, airborne drones which transmit data to UTM produce severe inter-cell interference since they have a strong line-of-sight connection to multiple LTE base stations. Hence, we investigate further the suitability of the LTE uplink for drone-to-infrastructure communications in very low level airspace by system-level simulations in this work. In particular, the maximum drone density that can be thoroughly monitored and safely coordinated by a UTM system with LTE communication links is identified. Our simulations show that LTE is not suitable for high-density scenarios due to the severe uplink interference. It is concluded that future research has to focus on the mitigation of inter-cell interference so even a large number of drones can get reliable access to all UTM services.

Verfügbare Versionen dieses Eintrags

• Suitability of LTE for Drone-to-Infrastructure Communications in Very Low Level Airspace. (deposited 08 Aug 2017 12:16)
  • Suitability of LTE for Drone-to-Infrastructure Communications in Very Low Level Airspace. (deposited 28 Nov 2017 13:57) [Gegenwärtig angezeigt]