Coordinator: Francesco Verde

Funds: to be assigned

Brief project description:

The ADVANCED SIGNAL PROCESSING AND OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR DRONE NETWORKS (DRONET) aims at studying the employment of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in order to enhance the performance of wireless communication networks. In particular, drones can be used to form drone-cells, which are spatial areas covered by drones equipped with base stations, whose aim is to provide wireless connectivity to users and/or devices in some critical circumstances, e.g., temporary congestion in the network, natural disaster, hard-to-reach areas. Moreover, drones can serve as relays for throughput/reliability improvement as well as range extensions. Finally, underlay spectrum sharing of multiple small drone-cells and spectrum sharing between small drone-cells and existing cellular network are studied in. In this project, network resource allocation problems will be studied by considering the new degrees of freedom in drone networks, i.e., the feasibility of dynamically instantiating, moving, and orchestrating over wide areas ensembles of drones, which can provide specific network services.