UAV for Wireless Communications

Overview

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have gained great popularity in recent years due to their decreasing cost and increasing functionality. In wireless communications, they are mainly used as aerial platforms to enable information delivery or power transfer. In this talk, applications of UAV in wireless communications are discussed. Firstly, aerial relaying using a group of UAVs will be studied. Two typical settings of using multiple UAVs in a multi-hop single link and in multiple dual-hop links will be optimized and compared to find the best solution for different scenarios. Secondly, UAV-enabled power transfer will be discussed. For sensors located in remote areas, UAVs will act as aerial hybrid access point to transfer power to the sensors after which the sensors use the transferred power to upload their sensing data. Finally, the use of UAV in maritime communications will be discussed. Currently maritime communications use either satellites or near-shore ground stations. Satellites are limited by latency while near-shore stations are limited by range. UAV provides an extra degree of freedom.

Brief Biography

Yunfei Chen obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Alberta in Canada in 2006. He is currently a Reader in the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick in the UK. His main research interests include wireless system design and analysis, UAV communications, joint radar-communications, energy harvesting communications, physical layer security, and machine learning for communications. He served as editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters and IEEE Communications Letters, as well as guest editors for special issues in various IEEE and non-IEEE journals. He was awarded exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Communications Letters and IEEE Wireless Communications Letters between 2015 and 2017. He won the Best Paper awards from the IEEE ICCC 2016, VTC-Spring 2017, ICNC 2018, WOCC2019 and WCSP2019. He has co-authored nearly 300 peer-reviewed journal papers and nearly 100 conference papers, 5 book chapters and one monograph. He was listed as Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate in 2020 and 2021, and he currently has 9200+ Google citations with an h-index of 45.