Call for Papers

Over the past few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other aerial platforms have become central to several aspects of business and daily life. From remote delivery to acquire landscape information to providing connectivity in emergency scenarios, drone features are proving to be extremely beneficial in places where man cannot reach or is unable to perform in a timely, efficient, or secure manner. This is paving the way for several disruptive new applications.

Nevertheless, management and operation of aerial platforms require the study and development of novel solutions in the field of Aerial Communications. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspect of these platforms is concerned with communications and networking. This includes two complementary areas: 1) the design of proper aerial communication solutions to enable (inter-UAV or ground-to-UAV) in a reliable and affordable manner, and 2) the usage of aerial platforms as mobile nodes, capable of moving the 3D space to support communications and service provisioning.

Research is still in its early stages with the goal of understanding how to characterize the aerial communication channel and the challenges and complexity of securing longer operation and battery life. This Feature Topic (FT) aims at addressing these two challenges by innovative solutions. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Networking architectures and communication protocols for aerial communications
• Aerial channel measurement and modeling for air-ground and air-air links
• Spectrum management and multiple access schemes for aerial communications
• Intelligent swarm and UAV communication systems
• Joint trajectory design and resource allocation in aerial communications
• UAV-assisted wireless communications
• 3-D networking
• Energy consumption models and energy-efficient aerial communications
• Connectivity for and among aerial platforms
• Large-scale experimentation, trial, and deployment of communicating aerial vehicles

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “May2022/Aerial Communications” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 October 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time extended to 8 October 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time
Decision Notification: 15 January 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 1 March 2022
Publication Date: May 2022

Guest Editors

Yong Zeng
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, China

Xingqin Lin
Ericsson Research Silicon Valley, CA, U.S.A.