Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a Service in Smart Cities Applications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were originally designed for military use, where they can eliminate the possibility of pilot loss when performing missions in hostile environments. Recently, smaller, and cheaper UAVs have become available, enabling a wide range of civilian uses. UAVs represent a flexible, relatively low-cost solution with modest fixed infrastructure needs.

Future uses of UAVs include data collection from constrained IoT devices, automated traffic monitoring and last-mile delivery. These uses, however, require UAVs with increased autonomy to plan and dynamically adapt missions to best use their limited flight time and computational power in response to collected data, changes in weather conditions, and hardware failure.

We envisage these tasks performed by a fleet of UAVs capable of ground-to-air and air-to-air communication, coordinating their planning, handing-off and reorganising tasks to accomplish their mission objectives efficiently.

The rapid advancements of wireless communication technologies and smart sensing devices are transforming the realization of smart cities. Among the myriad of applications, there is a need to support applications with strict time, communication resources and energy constraints. Examples include scenarios where low-resource IoT devices need to upload the sensed data to a remote control centre by target hard deadlines; otherwise, the data loses its value.

Another scenario is where distant platoons of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) need to coordinate their manoeuvres and speed in real time for enhanced road safety, capacity optimization and reduced CO2 emissions. Due to either limited wireless coverage or relatively poor-quality service due to overloaded communication infrastructure in dense areas, UAVs can be opportunistically used as data repeaters or data storage for information dissemination, collection, caching, and forwarding with performance guarantees.

By using UAVs opportunistically, the quality of service of various smart cities applications can be significantly improved without negative influence on the primary mission completion of UAVs. To this end, this PhD will develop original solutions to jointly predict and optimize the trajectory of UAVs, their radio resource allocation, and energy efficiency, to maximize the number of served ground users (e.g., IoT devices and CAVs) where each user has its own constraints and target deadlines depending on the use case.

Overall, this PhD project aims to answer the following research question:

"How might UAVs be efficiently and opportunistically used as an enabler of enhanced communication and coordination services among ground wireless networks and devices with minimum (or no) impact on their primary mission completion?"