Making Mobile Networks Fly

Advances in mobile (cellular) networks have ushered in an era of abundant connectivity. However, the stationary and expensive nature of their deployment has limited their ability to provide true "ubiquitous" connectivity under the 5G vision - especially to areas where connectivity is sparing or nonexistent (e.g. rural areas), has been compromised (e.g. disasters), or demands are extreme (e.g. venues/hotspots). The recent advances in un-manned aerial vehicle (UAVs) technology have the potential to change the landscape of wide-area wireless connectivity by bringing a new dimension - "mobility" to the cellular network infrastructure itself. By deploying base stations on each of the UAVs, service providers can now deploy and tear-down these cellular networks "in the sky" in an on-demand and flexible manner. This allows them to supplement static mobile networks in areas where additional connectivity is needed, or provide stand-alone connectivity in areas where existing mobile networks are either absent or compromised. However, realizing this vision of deploying heavy-weight cellular networks (e.g. LTE) on light-weight, resource-constrained platforms such as UAVs, faces several formidable challenges both in design and deployment. This is complicated by the complex nature of cellular networks that involve multiple interacting components - radio access network (RAN), evolved packet core (EPC) network and backhaul transport network. In this talk, I will present our system "SkyLiTE"-- one of the first efforts to design and deploy an on-demand, end-to-end, multi-cell LTE network (on UAVs) that can self-configure itself in the sky. I will discuss how SkyLiTE re-architects the various components (RAN, core and backhaul) of a cellular network to make it deployable on challenging UAV platforms in highly dynamic environments. We believe the validation of SkyLiTE in real-world deployments, will help contribute to a new era of mobile networks that can fly and make connectivity both abundant and ubiquitous.