[2312.15668] Air-to-Ground Communications Beyond 5G: UAV Swarm Formation Control and Tracking

Air-to-Ground Communications Beyond 5G: UAV Swarm Formation Control and Tracking

Xiao Fan, Peiran Wu, Minghua Xia

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have been widely accepted as promising technologies to support air-to-ground communications in the forthcoming sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks.

This paper proposes a novel air-to-ground communication model consisting of aerial base stations served by UAVs and terrestrial user equipments (UEs) by integrating the technique of coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission with the theory of stochastic geometry. In particular, a CoMP set consisting of multiple UAVs is developed based on the theory of Poisson-Delaunay tetrahedralization.

Effective UAV formation control and UAV swarm tracking schemes for two typical scenarios, including static and mobile UEs, are also developed using the multi-agent system theory to ensure that collaborative UAVs can efficiently reach target spatial positions for mission execution. Thanks to the ease of mathematical tractability, this model provides explicit performance expressions for a typical UE's coverage probability and achievable ergodic rate.

Extensive simulation and numerical results corroborate that the proposed scheme outperforms UAV communications without CoMP transmission and obtains similar performance to the conventional CoMP scheme while avoiding search overhead.

Comments:	14 pages, 9 figures, to appear in IEEE TWC
Subjects:	Information Theory (cs.IT); Signal Processing (eess.SP)
Cite as:	arXiv:2312.15668 [cs.IT]
	(or arXiv:2312.15668v1 [cs.IT] for this version)

Conclusions

In this paper, a novel UAV-enabled air-to-ground network model was proposed. In particular, the CoMP transmission technique was employed to enhance the communication quality, associated with the idea of Delaunay tetrahedralization, whereby four UAVs can jointly serve each UE, thus providing reliable and high-throughput connectivity. Then, two movement control strategies were developed, including the UAV formation control for static UEs and UAV swarm tracking for mobile UEs. 

Afterward, analytical expressions regarding the coverage probability and ergodic rate were derived for a typical UE. Finally, simulation and numerical results collaborated that CoMP transmission brings significant cooperative gain compared to the transmission without CoMP, and the proposed scheme performs similarly to the conventional CoMP scheme with four collaborative UAVs while avoiding search overhead and facilitating performance evaluation, thanks to its mathematical tractable geometric model.

Submission history

From: Minghua Xia [view email]
[v1] Mon, 25 Dec 2023 09:25:22 UTC (10,372 KB)

 Summary

• The document describes research on using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations to provide air-to-ground communications for future wireless networks like 5G and beyond.
• A novel air-to-ground communication model is proposed based on coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and Poisson-Delaunay tetrahedralization to determine sets of 4 cooperative UAVs.
• Effective UAV formation control and tracking strategies are developed for static and mobile user equipments (UEs) on the ground using approaches like pinning control and impulsive control.
• Analytical expressions are derived for performance metrics like coverage probability and ergodic rate of a typical UE to evaluate the proposed UAV CoMP scheme.
• Simulation and numerical results show the proposed scheme provides significant cooperative gain over non-CoMP transmission and achieves comparable performance to conventional CoMP while avoiding high overhead.
• Overall, the research aims to develop an efficient air-to-ground communication architecture using UAVs as aerial base stations and CoMP techniques to improve quality of service for ground users. The proposed schemes and analysis provide valuable insights on integrating UAVs into future wireless networks.

 CoMP Model

key points about the proposed CoMP air-to-ground communication model are:

• It utilizes UAVs as aerial base stations distributed in 3D height-limited airspace to provide line-of-sight (LoS) transmission to ground user equipments (UEs).
• The theory of Poisson-Delaunay tetrahedralization is used to determine the cooperative sets of 4 UAVs for joint transmission to each UE.
• Specifically, the 4 nearest neighboring UAVs in the horizontal plane are selected based on their planar projections. This avoids high overhead of exhaustive search methods.
• The 4 UAVs form a Delaunay tetrahedron in 3D space surrounding the UE and jointly transmit signals using coordinated multi-point (CoMP) techniques.
• Each UAV is equipped with multiple antennas for transmission while the UEs have single antennas. Maximum ratio transmission (MRT) beams are used.
• The received signal model accounts for aggregated desired signal power from the 4 CoMP UAVs and interference from other non-cooperative UAVs.
• Performance metrics like coverage probability and ergodic rate for a typical UE are analytically derived based on the proposed model.
• In summary, the CoMP model provides an efficient and mathematically tractable way to deploy UAV base stations and exploit cooperative transmission to improve air-to-ground communications.
• No artifacts, code or data is provided for independent validation of the research presented.
  

Authors

Here are some key points about the authors:

• The authors are Xiao Fan, Peiran Wu, and Minghua Xia.

• They are all affiliated with the School of Electronics and Information Technology at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China..

• Xiao Fan is currently pursuing a PhD degree at Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests include cooperative UAV communications and nonlinear systems.

• Peiran Wu received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Peiran Wu is also affiliated with the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory in Zhuhai, China. He is currently an Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include mobile edge computing and energy-efficient wireless communications.

• Minghua Xia is a Professor at Sun Yat-sen University and an Adjunct Professor at the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory. His general research area is wireless communications and signal processing. Linkedin
  

• The authors have previously published research works on topics like:

  • UAV-enabled wireless networks and communications
  • Coordinated multi-point transmission schemes
  • Stochastic geometry modeling of wireless networks
  • Wireless power transfer and energy harvesting

• They have published in journals like IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, etc.

So in summary, two of the three authors are professors and researchers at universities in China, with expertise and previous works in wireless communications, UAV networks, stochastic geometry modeling, etc.