Workshop on Drone Assisted Wireless Communications for 5G and Beyond

The Fifth International Workshop on DroneCom

(In Conjunction with ACM MobiCom’22)17-21 October 2022 | Sydney, Australia

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nowadays, 5G is hitting the mainstream fast. Characterized by high throughput and ultralow latency, 5G is paving the way for a fully digitalized and connected world. Over the past two years, we have seen many new field trials and commercial rollouts while relieving the pressure on over-congested networks. With 5G, mobile communication technology is leading towards the direction wherein massive Internet of Things (IoT) is likely to play a central role. Moreover, it is expected that beyond 5G deployments will be characterized by increased network density, enhanced capacity, near ubiquitous connectivity, and ultra-reliable and low latency communications, in order to deliver flawless quality of service (QoS) that is essential for IoT to be successful. To deal with these trends and support the growing appetite of data services, mobile backhaul becomes an indispensable solution towards realising 5G and beyond networsk. Moreover, the emergence of dense heterogeneous networks (HetNets), which are constantly promoted as a prime candidate for 5G evolution, has further provisioned the need of mobile backhaul solutions while making it a critical component of RAN. However, wireless backhauling relies on Small Cell Base Stations (SBSs); wherein the installation of extra-terrestrial infrastructures for SBSs may not be an acceptable solution due to the high cost of deployment. Thus, a huge paradigm shift in backhaul network design is highly desirable for 5G and beyond networks in order to dynamically manage the increasing traffic demands of SBSs and cater new applications with ease. In this direction, the integration of both terrestrial and aerial network components can be considered a promising solution. Therefore, drone-mounted infrastructure are envisioned to supplement the terrestrial infrastructure while improving flexibility and reliability of backhaul operations. However, in order to reap the full potential of drones in beyond 5G backhaul, it must cope with the inherent challenges like lack of fixed backhua links, multi-coordination, collision and crash avoidance, sparsely and intermittently connected network topologies, and moreover limited communication, computation, and endurance capabilities. Therefore, the proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their ideas, latest findings, and state-of-the-art results on fostering the promising benefits of drones in 5G and beyond wireless networks.

List of Potential Topics

• New architecture/communication protocols for drone-based 5G communications
• Channel modelling for drone-ground and drone-drone communications
• Simple, scalable and cost effective solutions for drone communications
• Massive MIMO based backhaul solutions
• Resource management and security mechanisms for drone enabled networking
• SDN and NFV based backhaul architectures
• Data offloading schemes for heterogeneous small cell networks
• Resource scheduling in backhaul networks
• Cutting-edge solutions for drone assisted heterogeneous networks
• Standardization efforts and testbeds for drone communication systems

• Standardization efforts and testbeds for drone communication systems
• Game theoretical approaches for drone based 5G communications
• New trends in backhauling
• AI and ML based architectures for dynamic routing in drone communications
• Authentication and Accounting for drone aided 5G communications
• Energy-aware drone deployment and operation mechanisms
• Interference management techniques for aerial platforms
• Use cases, testing and field trials for drone assisted 5G communications
• Other applications/implementations for integrating drones into 5G and beyond