How cellular networks can enable beyond visual line of sight commercial drone flights

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for civilian and commercial services has experienced a significant increase in the past couple of years. Emerging UAV enabled services, however, require extended beyond-visual-line-of-sight geographical range. One key regulatory requirement for these services is that the radio communication link must reliably cover a wide(er) area, when compared to the visual-line-of-sight range radio links currently used. Standardized cellular systems such as Long Term Evolution UMTS (LTE), are an obvious candidate to provide the radio communication link to UAVs. However, when being airborne, UEs see more cells and correspondingly receives more interference in the downlink and causes more interference in the uplink. Application traffic on top of the UAV control link, may require large uplink and/or downlink throughputs, potentially causing extensive interference to the terrestrial users. In this presentation, we use empirical measurements in live rural LTE networks to characterize the UAV radio channel and show the impact of uplink and downlink radio interference on the UAV radio connectivity performance. We also quantify the impact from serving UAVs on the terrestrial users. Further, we provide a baseline analysis on the potential of interference mitigation schemes, like power control, interference cancelling and beam-forming solutions needed to provide a reliable radio connectivity to the UAVs.