Tutorial: Role of Flying Platforms for Global Connectivity

Description

Driven by an emerging use of flying platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones and unmanned balloons in future network applications and the challenges that the 6G networks exhibit, the focus of this tutorial is to demonstrate the evolution of the flying platforms as a novel architectural enabler for radio access network (RAN) and their integration with the future cellular access and backhaul/fronthaul networks. These platforms are networked, flying and a potential way to offer high data rate, high reliability and ultra-low latent access and backhaul/fronthaul to future wireless networks. Such large scale deployable flying platforms and frameworks will guarantee the global information and communication requirements as articulated in United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for future smart and resilient cities and solve the ubiquitous and global connectivity problems in many challenging network environments, e.g., coverage or capacity enhancements for remote or sparsely populated areas, social gathering, and disaster affected scenarios, etc. This tutorial will provide balanced coverage on recent trends, challenges and future research and development on the integration of flying platforms with the future wireless networks. Specifically, this tutorial will provide answers for the following:

How flying platforms can be used for autonomous coverage hole discovery as an alternate to the minimization drive test by using machine learning to offer a reliable and scalable solution to enhance the coverage and capacity of the access networks (flying platform placement and user association problems)?

How flying platforms can be used to fronthaul the small cell deployment to the core network and offer a flexible and resilient wireless backhaul solution (flying platform deployment architecture, potential high data rate technologies, e.g., free space optics (FSO) and flying platform-small cell association problem)?

What are the economic, regulatory, and industrial perspectives of deploying flying platforms for cellular access and backhaul networks (total cost of operation, automation, and some latest regulations)?

Period	13 Sept 2021 → 16 Sept 2021
Event title	IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
Event type	Conference
Location	Oulu, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International