Research challenges and perspectives of UAV networks

Abstract

As soon as national legislations allow Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to fly autonomously, we will see swarms of UAV populating the sky of our smart cities to accomplish different missions: parcel delivery, infrastructure monitoring, event filming, surveillance, tracking, etc.
The main issues that a designer of a UAV network must face are related to the altitude of the UAVs above the ground as well as their mobility in a three-dimensional space. Furthermore, the UAVs are physically constrained by the limitations on the carriable payload as well as energetically constrained by the limited battery capacity. These issues make UAV communications very specific and raise a set of interesting research challenges for networks practitioners as well as for optimization researchers:How to take into account the effects of dominant UAV-ground channels and the consequent interference? How to use UAV mobility to improve the network performance while letting them carry out their mission? How to track the different communications requirements for application and control data?
In this talk, a survey of the current state of the art of the solutions for the mentioned problems will be presented, with a focus on the usage of controlled mobility in UAV networks. Promising research directions will also be introduced for a smooth integration of UAV networks into future mobile communication systems.

Short Bio

Enrico Natalizio is currently a Full Professor with the LORIA laboratory at the Université de Lorraine (France). He obtained his master’s degree magna cum laude and his Ph.D in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria (Italy) in 2000 and 2005 respectively. In 2005-2006 he was a visiting researcher at the BWN (Broadband Wireless Networking) Lab at Georgia Tech in Atlanta (USA). From 2006 till 2010, he was a research fellow at the Titan Lab of the Università della Calabria (Italy). In October 2010, he joined POPS team at Inria Lille – Nord Europe (France) as a postdoc researcher and from 2012 till 2018 he was an Associate Professor at the Université de technologie de Compiègne (France). His research interests include robot and sensor communications with applications in networking technologies for disaster management and infrastructure monitoring and IoT privacy and security. He is currently an associated editor of Elsevier Vehicular Communications, Computer Networks, Digital Communications and Networks, and Wiley&Hindawi Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and a former associate editor of Elsevier Ad hoc Networks.

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