Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2208.11967

Laser-Powered UAVs for Wireless Communication Coverage: A Large-Scale Deployment Strategy

Mohamed-Amine Lahmeri·Mustafa A. Kishk·Mohamed-Slim Alouini
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is strongly advocated for sixth-generation (6G) networks, as the 6G standard will not be limited to improving broadband services, but will also target the extension of the geographical cellular coverage. In this context, the deployment of UAVs is considered a key solution for seamless connectivity and reliable coverage. That being said, it is important to underline that although UAVs are characterized by their high mobility and their ability to establish line-of-sight (LOS) links, their use is still impeded by several factors such as weather conditions, their limited computing power, and, most importantly, their limited energy. In this work, we are aiming for the novel technology that enables indefinite wireless power transfer for UAVs using laser beams. We propose a novel UAV deployment strategy, based on which we analyze the overall performance of the system in terms of wireless coverage. To this end, we use tractable tools from stochastic geometry to model the complex communication system. We analyze the user's connectivity profile under different laser charging capabilities and in different type of environments. We show a decrease in the coverage probability by more than 12% in moderate-to-strong turbulence conditions compared to low turbulence conditions. We also show how the connection rate to the aerial network significantly decreases in favor of the terrestrial network for short laser charging ranges. We conclude that laser-powered drones are considered interesting alternatives when placed in LOS with users, in low-to-moderate optical turbulence, and at reasonable ranges from the charging stations.

Explore related subjects

eess.SP

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Mohamed-Amine Lahmeri, Mustafa A. Kishk, Mohamed-Slim Alouini. 2022-08-25. Laser-Powered UAVs for Wireless Communication Coverage: A Large-Scale Deployment Strategy. https://doi.org/10.1109/twc.2022.3195867

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Load Balancing in Multi-Shell LEO Satellite Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

Multi-shell low Earth orbit (LEO) networks can increase service opportunities, but altitude-dependent propagation can concentrate traffic on lower shells and create strong inter-shell interference under full frequency reuse. This paper develops a mathematical framework for load balancing in multi-shell LEO satellite networks. Satellites on each shell form an independent spherical Poisson point process (SPPP), and the typical user associates with one of the per-shell serving satellites through a shell-dependent biased received-power rule, with receiver-side successive interference cancellation (SIC) under full frequency reuse. Shell-wise association probabilities, conditioned serving-distance distributions, and the rate coverage probability under shell-dependent traffic loads are derived and validated by simulation. The results show that shell-dependent biasing alleviates lower-shell traffic concentration and improves rate coverage, while receiver-side SIC mitigates the dominant lower-shell interference experienced by users associated with upper shells. Load balancing provides its largest rate-coverage gain in traffic hotspots, while SIC becomes more valuable as receive-side isolation weakens. With a fixed satellite budget, distributing satellites across multiple shells can further improve hotspot rate coverage by adding shell-wise serving opportunities.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Tensor Decomposition Based Mixed-Field Sensing for XL-MIMO AFDM Systems

Integrated sensing and communications enabled by extremely large-scale MIMO (XL-MIMO) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a highly promising paradigm for vehicular networks. However, the near-field spherical wavefront distortions induce severe non-linear parameter coupling, while the highly dynamic scattering environments exacerbate mismatch errors. To address these critical challenges, this paper proposes a novel tensor-based sensing scheme for XL-MIMO AFDM systems. First, the received signals are reformulated into a tensor, followed by an efficient decomposition approach that exploits the inherent Vandermonde structure of the factor matrices. This allows parameters to be directly estimated from the decomposed matrices, effectively avoiding inter-parameter coupling. Subsequently, a symmetric decoupling and real-domain manifold optimization algorithm is proposed for angle of arrival estimation, circumventing the high-dimensional searches typically induced by near-field effects. Furthermore, a baseband reconstruction and analytical gradient-based algorithm is developed to perform delay-Doppler estimation in the continuous parameter domain, fundamentally eradicating the grid-mismatch errors inherent in high-mobility scenarios. With these decoupled factors, the remaining unknown angle of departure can be readily extracted. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements in delay-Doppler accuracy and eliminates the error floors in angular estimation that severely bottleneck state-of-the-art baselines.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2026

Radio Map Construction with Post-Hoc Location Calibration under Quasi-Static Positioning Errors: Joint Estimation, Performance Bounds, and GNSS-Based Evaluation

Radio maps enable environment-aware wireless and Internet-of-Things applications and can be constructed from location-tagged received signal strength (RSS) measurements collected by mobile devices. In urban environments, temporally correlated GNSS errors can shift an entire sensing trajectory, causing systematic spatial misregistration that is not mitigated by collecting more measurements. This paper presents a radio-map construction framework that uses the radio measurements themselves to calibrate erroneous location tags after data collection. The dominant positioning error is modeled as a sensor-specific quasi-static offset, which is jointly estimated with radio-propagation parameters in a Gaussian process regression (GPR) framework by exploiting complementary spatial information from distance-dependent path loss and spatially correlated shadowing. We establish lower and upper bounds on the conditional Bayes risk and show that, under a translation-invariant trajectory model, trajectory information alone cannot identify the quasi-static offset, thereby motivating the use of RSS-derived spatial information for calibration. Numerical evaluations across propagation conditions show that the proposed method reduces the mean squared error (MSE) gap from ideal GPR to approximately $3.26\mathrm{dB}^2$, compared with about $10\mathrm{dB}^2$ for position-error-agnostic and noisy-input GPR baselines. Evaluation using positioning-error models derived from smartphone GNSS measurements shows that the proposed method outperforms a KF--RTS trajectory-smoothing baseline despite unmodeled time-varying positioning errors, remaining within approximately $5\mathrm{dB}^2$ of ideal GPR at the median MSE. These results demonstrate that RSS measurements can serve not only as observations for radio-map reconstruction but also as spatial cues for post-hoc calibration of imperfectly geotagged sensing data.

eess.SP↗