Performance of 5G terrestrial network deployments for serving UAV communications

Abstract

With the recent decrease in their size and cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become more accessible for general-purpose applications. A natural way of providing network access to UAVs is to use terrestrial fifth generation (5G) deployments. In this paper, we assess 5G air-to-ground (A2G) links of low-height UAVs in suburban scenarios with system-level simulations. In order to obtain realistic results, we utilized a propagation channel model extracted from actual A2G measurements. We characterized the performance of the communication system by means of throughput results. We also showed the importance of the feedback delay optimization when the UAV flight speed is high, not only for the achievable throughput, but also for the end-to-end transmission delay, which may be crucial in critical communications (e.g., safety-related ones).