Beyond Visual Line of Sight Piloting of UAVs Using Millimeter-Wave Cellular Networks

In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits and challenges of using millimeter wave (mm-Wave) cellular network to carry out Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations for remote piloting of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We evaluate the reliability and latency of the wireless link between a UAV and a serving mm-Wave Base Station (BS) in the finite blocklength regime with the ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) requirements of 5G. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we integrate several realistic models including mm-Wave antenna arrays, beamforming, mm-Wave propagation, and LOS probabilities. Our results show that cooperation and coordination among BSs are critical for UAV piloting using mm-Wave technology. We analyze the performance of mm-Wave links under three scenarios representing different levels of interference mitigation. We show that there is a certain range of message size and block length where it is possible to achieve URLLC requirements with packet error probability of 10−5 and latency below 1 ms when assuming cooperation.