ADVANCED INTERFERENCE MITIGATION TECHNIQUES FOR CELLULAR-CONNECTED DRONE COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones has increased rapidly over the last decade. To support their large-scale deployment, a new wireless networking paradigm, namely, cellular-connected UAV, has received an upsurge of interest recently. Specifically, cellular base stations (BSs) and spectrum are used to serve UAVs as new aerial users for significantly enhancing their communication performance. However, different from the existing terrestrial users, the high altitude of UAV results in line-of-sight (LoS) dominant channel with both its serving and non-serving BSs in a wide area, which will cause strong aerial-ground interferences that could severely impair the communication performance of both UAVs and terrestrial users. Conventional interference mitigation techniques for terrestrial network are generally ineffective in resolving the new UAV-terrestrial interference problem. To tackle the above challenge, this thesis proposes new interference mitigation solutions to achieve spectral efficient operation of the cellular network with co-existing UAVs and terrestrial users.