Electrification turned over a new leaf in aviation by introducing new types of aerial vehicles along with new means of transportation. Addressing a plethora of use cases, drones are gaining attention in the industry and increasingly appear in the sky. Emerging concepts of flying taxi enable passengers to be transported over several tens of kilometers. Therefore, unmanned traffic management systems are under development to cope with the complexity of future airspace, thereby resulting in unprecedented communication needs. Moreover, the long-term increase in the number of commercial airplanes pushes the limits of voice-oriented communications, and future options such as single-pilot operations demand robust connectivity. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review and vision for enabling the connectivity applications of aerial vehicles utilizing current and future communication technologies. We begin by categorizing the connectivity use cases per aerial vehicle and analyzing their connectivity requirements. By reviewing more than 500 related studies, we aim for a comprehensive approach to cover wireless communication technologies, and provide an overview of recent findings from the literature toward the possibilities and challenges of employing the wireless communication standards. After analyzing the proposed network architectures, we list the open-source testbed platforms to facilitate future investigations by researchers. This study helped us observe that while numerous works focused on cellular technologies to enable connectivity for aerial platforms, a single wireless technology is not sufficient to meet the stringent connectivity demands of the aerial use cases, especially for the piloting operations. We identified the need of further investigations on multi-technology heterogeneous network architectures to enable robust and real-time connectivity in the sky. Future works should consider suitable technology combinations to develop unified aerial networks that can meet the diverse quality of service demands of the aerial use cases.

In nano-bio networks, multiple transmitter-receiver pairs will operate in the same medium. Both inter-symbol interference and multi-user interference can cause saturation at the receiver side, and this effect may cause an outage. Thus, we propose a tractable framework to calculate the theoretical operating points for fully absorbing receiver.

At the network access layer, optical fiber deployment continues at pace but copper cables containing twisted pairs (TWPs) will remain for some time and face an increasing bandwidth and data rate demand. Surface waves have been proposed to address these requirements. This article reports and investigates the existence of stopbands reaching over 50-dB insertion loss on 1-m-long, typical final drop cables under surface wave excitation at a few gigahertz. Coupled mode analysis shows that lack of helical symmetry enables the formation of a stopband in systems containing TWPs. A representative core model containing a single TWP alongside a straight wire is thoroughly studied. Numerical simulations and measurements confirm the crucial dependence of the stopband frequency on the twist rate of the TWP. Further investigation into the role of the dielectric coating and the distance of the straight wire is performed as well. Finally, in systems with multiple TWPs, we find that the twist rate associated with any pair can create a stopband effectively limiting surface wave propagation. Thus, careful design and deployment strategies are required for use of surface waves on legacy copper networks.

Aircraft cabins are one of the last venues without mobile broadband. Considering future 5G applications and connectivity requirements, direct air-to-ground communications (DA2GC) is the only technique which can provide high capacity and low latency backhaul link for aircraft via a direct communication link. To this end, we propose an analytical framework to investigate the ground station deployment problem for DA2GC network employing multi-user beamforming with dual-polarized hybrid DA2GC antenna arrays. In addition, the proposed framework is utilized to analyze and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the DA2GC network to provide coverage for European airspace. We present the interplay between different network parameters: the number of ground stations, array size, transmit power and bandwidth, and TCO optimizing deployment parameters are calculated in order to satisfy capacity requirements. At the end, we show that, depending on the cost of different network resources, a terrestrial cellular network can be designed to cover the whole European airspace with limited number of ground stations with a certain array size, i.e., 900 and 361 antenna elements for ground station and air station, respectively.