The current development of 5G networks represents a breakthrough in the design of communication networks, for its ability to provide a single platform enabling a wide variety of data services. With these significant enhancements enabled by 5G, it is already possible to envision the needs towards 6G. Providing “connectivity from the sky” is one innovative trend for upcoming 6G communication systems. Satellites, high and low altitude platforms (HAP and LAP), drones, aircrafts, and airships are being considered as candidates for deploying wireless communications complementing terrestrial communications. Combining these network elements, Aerial Access Networks (AANs) have attracted significant attention from both academia and industry, and are recognized as a candidate solution for 6G communications. AANs are heterogeneous networks that are engineered to utilize satellites, HAPs, and LAPs to build network access platforms. Unlike terrestrial wireless networks, AANs are characterized by dynamic, thus frequently changed, network topologies and more vulnerable communication connections. However, AANs are not intended to replace the existing technologies, but instead to work with them in a complementary and integrated fashion. Therefore, AANs are accompanied with the demand for seamless integration of heterogeneous networks, such that the network Quality-of-Service (QoS) can be improved. Therefore, it is essential to develop new communications, signal processing, and optimization approaches to accommodate diverse services and applications with different QoS requirements in various scenarios.
This IEEE/KICS Journal of Communication Networks Special Issue aims to solicit high-quality unpublished research papers by experts from mobile communication industries (operators, telecom vendors, as well as consulting firms) and academia in the fields of AANs. In the following, we would like to introduce the four excellent papers included in this Special Issue.
In “Interference-Aware Path Planning Optimization for Multiple UAVs in Beyond 5G Networks”, coauthored by Lee et. al, a trajectory planning method is designed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in UAV-aided 5G/6G networks. The novelty of this method is to create interference-aware trajectory model by taking the interference with the unit disk graph. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method allows for approximately 21% gains, while being able to maintain a similar level of traveling time compared to the benchmark solution.
In “Robust Secure UAV Relay-Assisted Cognitive Communications with Resource Allocation and Cooperative Jamming”, coauthored by Wang et. al, the physical layer security issue is studied in UAV-assisted cognitive relay systems. To prevent an eavesdropper wiretapping information, the average worst-case secrecy rate of the secondary relay network is maximized, by jointly optimizing robust trajectories and power of the UAV relay and jammer. The developed novel resource allocation scheme is shown to improve the security performance effectively in comparison with benchmark schemes.
In “Beyond 5G: Reducing the Handover Rate for High Mobility Communications”, authored by Naor Zohar, proximity-based clusters, as nomadic cells integrated with AANs, are proposed to reduce the burden caused by rapid handover requests. This scheme is proved to be scalable and applicable for real-time services.
In “Temporal Deep Learning Assisted UAV Communication Channel Model For Application in EH-MIMO-NOMA Set-Up”, coauthored by Misra et. al, a machine learning based channel modeling for UAV communications is presented. This paper introduces a deep learning method to capture the variance of channel gains. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified with a Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) and Non-Orthogonal Multi-Access (NOMA) set-up in urban areas.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors who contributed manuscripts to this Special Issue, as well as all the reviewers for their valuable and timely reviews that significantly improved the quality of these papers. We are also grateful to the IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications Networks for the opportunity to establish this Special Section and to all the editorial staff for their support and guidance during the whole editorial process. We hope that this Special Issue could serve as a useful reference for researchers, scientists, engineers, and academics who are working in the area of AANs.