Urban Air Mobility—A 6G Use Case?

Abstract

The increasing popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has resulted in exponential growth of the market owing to numerous applications that have been facilitated by advances in battery technology and wireless communications. Given the successes of UAVs thus far, researchers are already gearing towards aerial transport systems that consist of dense deployment of both UAVs and Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAVs) with human passengers. Although the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) key performance indicators have been optimised to support drone use cases for both high data rates and low latency applications, future aerial transport systems will require stricter network key performance indicators to support the expected massive deployment of aerial vehicles taking into account network capacity and distance between the base station and the aerial vehicles, among others. In this article, we present our perspective, vision, architecture, requirements and key performance indicators for future aerial wireless networks supported by 6G for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Furthermore, we review key enabling technologies and discuss future challenges for incorporating aerial wireless networks in 6G.