T3 Title: Cellular Networks for Safe Drone Operations

Organizer: Aymen Fakhreddine
Organizer: Evgenii Vinogradov

Abstract: Small drones are becoming a part of our everyday life. They are used in a wide variety of commercial applications, and the number of drones in the air is steadily growing. We believe that the IEEE VTS community will be interested in a tutorial on this timely and motivating topic. The tutorial consists of two main parts dedicated to i) a general introduction to the wireless support of UAVs conflict management and ii) an experimental analysis of the current cellular networks readiness for ensuring safe UAV use. We start this tutorial with a brief introduction describing the most promising drone-enabled use cases. To guarantee the safe operation of drones, traffic management rules must be designed and implemented by avionics and telecommunication experts. In this tutorial, we describe the common terminology for these two communities. The first part (by E.Vinogradov) is concluded by formulating the main requirements imposed by safe drone operations to the cellular networks. The second part (by A. Fakhreddine) motivates through extensive measurement campaigns the potential of 4G and 5G networks for drones communications while it depicts the challenges that must be addressed to guarantee drones safe operations.

 

Bio: Aymen Fakhreddine holds a doctoral and master degree in telematic engineering from the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain) with expertise in wireless communications, networking, and localization. He is a senior researcher at Lakeside Labs (Klagenfurt, Austria) working on cellular-connected drone systems. He previously held a similar position at the University of Klagenfurt, worked as a researcher at IMDEA Networks Institute (Madrid, Spain) and a visiting researcher at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He also holds a master degree in advanced wireless communication systems from École Supérieure d’Électricité (CentraleSupélec) in Paris (France) and an engineering degree in Telecommunications from INPT Rabat (Morocco).

 

Bio: Evgenii Vinogradov received the Dipl. Engineer degree in Radio Engineering and Telecommunications from Saint-Petersburg Electro-technical University (Russia), in 2009. After several years of working in the field of mobile communications, he joined UCLouvain (Belgium) in 2013, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2017. His doctoral research interests focused on multidimensional radio propagation channel modeling. In 2017, Evgenii joined the electrical engineering department at KU Leuven (Belgium) where he is working on wireless communications with UAVs and UAV detection. He has also authored several tutorials (during ICC’19, EuCAP’19, and IE’19) dedicated to various aspects of wireless communications with drones. Moreover, he actively participated in SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) project PercEvite. This resulted in a clear understanding of the regulators’ needs and goals.