Distinguished talk by Prof. David Matolak on – Physical-Layer Reliability for Air-Ground and Air-Air Networking

Vehicle to vehicle and Vehicle to ground communications – reliability aspects and networking.

Physical Layer Reliability Considerations for Air-Ground and Air-Air Networking

A Distinguished Lecture by Professor David Matolak

On a typical day, over 100,000 aircraft take flight across the world. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts over 500,000 registered UAVs (or, “drones”) in 2021, and continued growth is expected. Air traffic management (ATM) is the set of processes and procedures for coordinating all these flights safely and efficiently, and this will become more challenging as air traffic density increases, especially for small and low-flying UAVs. Since effective ATM requires highly reliable communications, researchers across the world are actively investigating new aviation communications for air-ground (AG) and air-air (AA) links, for command and control (C2) as well as for unique UAV applications. In the USA, NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate has several programs for integrating new aircraft and UAVs into the National Airspace System, and is now investigating advanced air mobility (AAM), which will include cargo and passenger flights near and within urban areas. Numerous companies, including Uber, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, along with wireless companies such as Qualcomm and Nokia—for 5G and beyond services—are also investigating UAV use. Naturally, traditional aircraft developers such as Boeing and Airbus are also conducting research on UAVs and advanced ATM as well. One 5G service type—ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC)—may be of particular interest for advanced air mobility (AAM) and UAV C2 links. In this talk we address high reliability communication for UAVs, focusing primarily on the physical layer. We begin with a short introduction of UAVs, AAM, and AA/AG communications, a few high-profile programs, and a brief description of some UAV communication requirements. From there we address the challenges of a potentially rapidly time-varying and distorting wireless channel that includes multipath components as well as obstructions, and interference, both unintentional and intentional. Included in the presentation are some example AG channel results from a NASA measurement campaign, comments on and results for the modeling of such channels, some recent analytical results for the AA channel, and example results for dynamic statistical channel characteristics such as spatial correlation and statistical stationarity distance. Some remarks on future work for reliable AG/AA networking conclude the presentation.

Speaker(s): David Matolak,

Agenda:
June 10 2021

6.45pm — host and speaker login, checks

6.55pm — Introducing the speaker

7.00pm – 8.00 pm Distinguished talk

8.00-8.15pm Q & A

Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/273182