Aerial Control System for Spectrum Efficiency in UAV-to-Cellular Communications

The next generation of mobile systems, 5G, will be the communication standard that accommodates the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to support many applications in providing 5G connectivity to the IoT, by extending highspeed connectivity from the sky to objects on the ground, or even by carrying onboard some IoT devices. However, given their critical nature, the management of UAVs induces high exchange of control messages with the ground control station, resulting in the crowded spectrum used by cellular networks. The authors raise the problem of degrading the network spectrum with UAVs' management messages, and discuss the need for an efficient orchestration system. In this article, they propose a novel scheme, dubbed the aerial control system, which is based on separating the data plane from the control plane of UAVs, and pushing the latter to be performed in the air by UAVs. The solution provides an orchestration logic that takes advantage of the autonomous nature of UAVs to organize UAVs in one or several clusters. UAV-to-UAV communication enables spectrum reuse and avoids crowding the network with management messages, while dedicating more 5G spectrum for ensuring more bandwidth to the IoT through UAV-to-infrastructure communication.