Towards Efficient Control of Mobile Network-Enabled UAVs

The efficient control of mobile network-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is targeted in this paper. In particular, a downlink scenario is considered, in which control messages are sent to UAVs via cellular base stations (BSs). Unlike terrestrial user equipment (UEs), UAVs perceive a large number of BSs, which can lead to increased interference causing poor or even unacceptable throughput. This paper proposes a framework for efficient control of UAVs. First, a communication model is introduced for flying UAVs taking into account interference, path loss and fast fading. The characteristics of UAVs make such model different compared to traditional ones. Thereafter, in order to ensure the efficient control, a solution is proposed for reducing interference. This is achieved by efficiently assigning sub-carriers to the UAVs in a way to reduce interference. A maximum independent set formulation is proposed along with an algorithm for optimal sub-carrier allocation. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution in terms of enhancing the link quality of UAVs.