Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Mobile Communications and Computing

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released its first 5G specifications in December 2017. 3GPP Release 15 defines a new radio access network, new security architecture, services and applications, among others. These specifications will be refined with new releases that will include enhancements to cellular vehicular to everything (C-V2X), first introduced in LTE in Release 14, as well as the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UASs). This paper proposes a city-scale R&D platform enabling advanced mobile communications and computing experiments with 5G technology and UASs. The large-scale testbed is proposed by an academic-industry consortium to serve the needs of researchers, developers, practitioners, regulators, and educators, among others. We present the unique aspects of this platform, its architecture and user services, for enabling experiments in controlled, yet production-like environments. Sample research projects, including 5G security and distributed wireless and computing resource management, indicate the broad R&D scope and the impact that such platform can have on technology evolution, regulation, standardization and new computing and communications services.