UAV Enabled Wireless Networks

Supervisor: Professor Arumugam Nallanathan

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks have kindled strong attention of both academia and industry, owing to their low cost, fast mobility, and adjustable altitude. In contrast to conventional terrestrial base stations (BSs), the maneuverability of UAVs provides multifarious potential benefits for various wireless systems. On the one hand, UAVs are capable of providing ubiquitous coverage efficiently in several special applications, e.g. firefighting, reconnaissance, remote sensing, disaster rescue, etc. On the other hand, by optimizing moving trajectories and serving positions, these mobile terminals are able to enhance the capacity of traditional cellular networks, especially for hotspot regions and ad hoc communications. Considering the limited spectrum resource at cellular carrier frequencies below 6 GHz, millimetre-wave (mmWave) becomes an ideal candidate for UAV networks due to its huge free bandwidth. MmWave allows larger bandwidth allocations than sub-6 GHz. In particular, at 30 GHz and 60 GHz, the allocated band-width for each user can be over 1 GHz, which boosts the data rate up to Gigabit-per-second. Moreover, benefited by the small wavelength of mmWave signals, large-scale antenna arrays can be integrated on UAVs. This improvement enables new spatial processing techniques, such as mmWave massive multiple in-put multiple output (MIMO) and array signal processing in UAV-aided networks. The aim of this project is to develop channel Estimation and tracking strategy for MmWave UAV Systems as well as to develop hybrid precoding schemes.