May 20, 2019, Shanghai, China

SCOPE

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found fast growing applications during the past few years. In June 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United Sates released the operational rules for routine commercial use of small-unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), which will further spur the fast growth of the global UAV industry in the coming years. As such, it is imperative to develop innovative communication technologies for supporting reliable UAV command and control (C&C), as well as mission-related payload communication. However, traditional UAV systems mainly rely on the simple direct communication between the UAV and the ground pilot over unlicensed spectrum (e.g., ISM 2.4GHz), which is typically of low data rate, unreliable, insecure, vulnerable to interference, difficult to legitimately monitor and manage, and can only operate within the visual line of sight (LoS) range.

To overcome the above limitations, there has been significant interest in integrating UAVs into cellular communication systems. On the one hand, UAVs with their own missions could be connected into cellular networks as new aerial users. Thanks to the advanced cellular technologies and almost ubiquitous accessibility of cellular networks, cellular-connected UAVs are expected to achieve orders-of-magnitude performance improvement over the existing point-to-point UAV communications. It also offers an effective option to strengthen the legitimate UAV monitoring and management, and achieve more robust UAV navigation by utilizing cellular signals as a complement to GPS (Global Position System). On the other hand, dedicated UAVs could be deployed as aerial base stations (BSs), access points (APs), or relays, to assist terrestrial wireless communications from the sky, leading to another paradigm known as UAV-assisted communications. UAV-assisted communications have several promising advantages, such as the ability to facilitate on-demand deployment, high flexibility in network reconfiguration, high chance of having LoS communication links, and enable numerous applications such as BS traffic offloading, information dissemination and collection for Internet of Things (IoTs).

UAV communications are significantly different from conventional communication systems, due to the high altitude and high mobility of UAVs, the unique channel of UAV-ground links, the asymmetric quality of service (QoS) requirements for downlink C&C and uplink mission-related data transmission, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the additional design degrees of freedom enabled by joint UAV mobility control and communication resource allocation.

Considering the great success of the 1st Workshop on “Integrating UAVs into 5G” in ICC 2018, we aim to organize the 2nd Workshop on “Integrating UAVs into 5G and Beyond” in ICC 2019 to bring together academic researchers, industrial practitioners, and individuals working on this emerging exciting research areas to share their new ideas, latest findings, and state-of-the-art results. Topics of interest for this workshop include but are not limited to the following:

  • Channel measurement and modeling for UAV-BS/UAV-terminal/UAV-UAV communication links
  • Network architectures and communication protocols for UAV communications
  • Spectrum management and multiple access schemes for cellular-connected UAVs
  • Interference mitigation for cellular-connected UAVs
  • Massive MIMO/Millimeter wave communications for cellular-connected UAVs
  • 3D aerial BS placement and online/offline UAV trajectory optimization
  • Joint trajectory design and resource allocation for UAV communications
  • Energy consumption model and energy supplying methods of UAVs
  • Multi-UAV networks and fundamental tradeoffs in UAV-enabled wireless networks
  • Theoretical frameworks for the analysis of UAV communications
  • System-level simulation studies of UAV communications
  • Cyber security and physicals security of UAV communications
  • Experimental performance demonstrations, prototyping, and field-tests of UAV communications
  • Standardization progress
  • Economical frameworks for UAV communications, e.g., cost studies, business models, etc.
  • Regulatory schemes for UAV communications, e.g., safety operation, privacy protection, etc.

 

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS:

 

STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS:

  • Prof. Xiaohu You, IEEE Fellow, Southeast University, China 
  • Prof. Robert Schober, IEEE Fellow, Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany 
  • Prof. Wei Zhang, IEEE Fellow, The University of New South Wales, Australia

 

TPC CO-CHAIRS:

  • Dr. Harpreet S. Dhillon, Virginia Tech, USA 
  • Dr. Lorenzo Galati Giordano, Nokia Bell Labs, Ireland 
  • Prof. Mahbub Hassan, The University of New South Wales, Australia

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

  • Prof. Rui Zhang, IEEE Fellow, National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Prof. David Gesbert, IEEE Fellow, EURECOM, France

 

INDUSTRY PANEL:

  • Prof. Mérouane Debbah, IEEE Fellow, Director of the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab, Huawei (Tentative)
  • Dr. Xingqin Lin, Senior Researcher and Standards Delegate, Ericsson
  • Dr. Lorenzo Galati Giordano, Member of Technical Staff, Nokia Bell Labs

 

TENTATIVE DEADLINES:

  • Paper Submission Deadline: January 25, 2019