Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms, on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly reconfigured, and likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

In this paper, we consider a novel mobile relaying technique, where the relay nodes are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hence are capable of moving at high speed. Compared with conventional static relaying, mobile relaying offers a new degree of freedom for performance enhancement via careful relay trajectory design. We study the throughput maximization problem in mobile relaying systems by optimizing the source/relay transmit power along with the relay trajectory, subject to practical mobility constraints (on the UAV's speed and initial/final relay locations), as well as the information-causality constraint at the relay. It is shown that for the fixed relay trajectory, the throughput-optimal source/relay power allocations over time follow a “staircase” water filling structure, with non-increasing and non-decreasing water levels at the source and relay, respectively. On the other hand, with given power allocations, the throughput can be further improved by optimizing the UAV's trajectory via successive convex optimization. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the power allocations and relay trajectory alternately. Furthermore, for the special case with free initial and final relay locations, the jointly optimal power allocation and relay trajectory are derived. Numerical results show that by optimizing the trajectory of the relay and power allocations adaptive to its induced channel variation, mobile relaying is able to achieve significant throughput gains over the conventional static relaying.

In terrestrial communication networks without fixed infrastructure, unmanned aerial vehicle-mounted mobile base stations (MBSs) provide an efficient solution to achieve wireless connectivity. This letter aims to minimize the number of MBSs needed to provide wireless coverage for a group of distributed ground terminals (GTs), ensuring that each GT is within the communication range of at least one MBS. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm with successive MBS placement, where the MBSs are placed sequentially starting on the area perimeter of the uncovered GTs along a spiral path toward the center, until all GTs are covered. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably compared with other schemes in terms of the number of required MBSs as well as time complexity.

In this letter, we propose multi-antenna based spectrum sensing methods for cognitive radios (CRs) using the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) paradigm. The proposed methods utilize the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix of the received signal vector from multiple antennas, taking advantage of the fact that in practice, the primary user signals to be detected will either occupy a subspace of dimension strictly smaller than the dimension of the observation space, or have a non-white spatial spectrum. These methods do not require prior knowledge of the primary user signals, or the channels from the primary users to the CR. By making different assumptions on the availability of the white noise power value at the CR receiver, we derive two algorithms that are shown to outperform the standard energy detector.

Cooperative diversity schemes significantly improve the performance of wireless networks by transmitting the same information through several nodes. The amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying method is one of the most attractive cooperative diversity schemes due to its low complexity. Selection AF relaying has recently been proven to achieve the same diversity order as and lower outage probability than all-participate relays. In this letter, we present an asymptotic analysis of the symbol error rates of a selection AF network, and compare it with the conventional all-participate scheme