Massive MIMO for Drone Communications: Applications, Case Studies and Future Directions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are proliferating. Several applications, such as surveillance, disaster management, and drone racing, place high requirements on the communication with the drones – in terms of throughout, reliability, 3D connectivity, and latency. Existing wireless technologies, notably WiFi, that are currently used for drone communications are limited to short ranges and lowmobility situations. A new, scalable technology is needed to meet future demands. Massive MIMO, a promising technology component of emerging 5G cellular networks, has the potential to meet these requirements. Specifically, Massive MIMO offers significant range extensions, support for fast-moving drones, and the possibility to spatially multiplex entire swarms of drones communicating simultaneously. DRONE TECHNOLOGY IS PROLIFERATING During the past decades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the form of drones have been predominantly used for military applications such as battlefield and airspace surveillance, and border patrol. More recently, due to technological advancements in battery and control technology, and miniaturization of electronics, the use of drones for civilian applications is exploding. Such applications include traffic and crowd monitoring, search-and-rescue operations during earthquakes, flooding and other disasters, inspection of non-reachable areas, and the transportation of goods [1]–[3]. Inexpensive light-weight drones are widely available for diverse personal uses such as aerial photography and drone racing. Several 5G use cases for drones were identified by 3GPP [4]: broadband access to under-developed areas, hot-spot coverage during sporting events, and rapidly deployable “on-demand” densification. More applications are likely to emerge [5]. The potential of multi-drone networks is particularly significant. Many small drones can be deployed in a short time to cover a large geographical area. In many applications, a goal for the drones would be to stream high-quality imagery or videos to a ground station (GS) within stipulated reliability and latency constraints. As the required throughputs are very high, existing wireless technologies are incapable of providing the required service. In this article, we make the case that Massive MIMO [6], an emerging 5G physical-layer technology, can enable communication with large multi-drone networks that stream big amounts of real-time data to the ground. In a recent paper, [7], we presented various rather technical results on Massive MIMO for aerial communications. The object of the article at hand is to summarize important conclusions ar X iv :1 71 1. 07 66 8v 1 [ cs .I T ] 2 1 N ov 2 01 7