Call for Papers

While drones have found use in military applications for decades, they have recently entered the commercial application arena with huge market investments coming up over the next decade. They are particularly popular in application domains like public safety, surveillance, package/goods delivery, first responders, to name a few. They are being seen as wireless services on the fly that can augment or complement the capabilities of the current terrestrial wireless communication networks. Drones require radio frequency spectrum to connect and communicate with the ground base stations irrespective of the underlying application. Terrestrial wireless networks are capable of supporting low-altitude drone communications and can thereby help in improving the reliability, security, and safety of the drone operations. However, transmission from the drones to the terrestrial networks have the potential of interfering with a large number of terrestrial nodes because of their larger coverage footprint. This leads to a plethora of research challenges related to the coexistence of drone and terrestrial networks. Primarily, we need to understand the rules and regimes under which it makes sense for the drone networks to share spectrum with the terrestrial networks. Likewise, it is also important to study situations in which it will be suitable for drones to operate over licensed frequency bands. Therefore, even though integration of drones with the terrestrial networks is inevitable and will likely inspire a new suite of applications, many challenges need to be tackled before this becomes a reality. As an example, existing cellular networks where not designed or optimized to serve or support aerial devices, which demands significant rethinking in the design and operation of these networks if we are to reliably support these new aerial services.

Given the cross-disciplinary nature of these challenges, this Special Issue (SI) will provide an important platform for the researchers from academia, industry, and government, to present their latest research on the coexistence of drone and terrestrial networks.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Spectrum sharing techniques for the coexistence of drone and terrestrial networks.
• Communication theory and propagation science for 3D networks.
• Testbed development for coexisting drone and terrestrial networks.
• Stochastic network modeling for coexisting drone and terrestrial networks.
• Performance characterization and optimization of 3D networks.
• Spectral and energy efficiency analysis for 3D networks. 
• Resource sharing strategies for 3D networks.
• Mobility constraints and considerations for coexisting drone and terrestrial networks.
• Measurements and models of air-to-ground channels for 3D networks.
• Study of the correlation between terrestrial and air-to-ground links.
• Network resilience and reliability of coexisting drone and terrestrial networks.
• Interference modeling, design, and mitigation in 3D networks.
• Security challenges for coexisting drone and terrestrial networks.
• Network densification and cooperative communications for 3D networks.
• Massive MIMO/Millimetre-wave communications for 3D networks.
• Emerging applications of 3D networks.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should prepare their submissions in accordance with the rules specified in the Information for Authors of the IEEE Wireless Communications guidelines. Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript to Manuscript Central. Select ‘December 2022/ Coexistence of Drone and Terrestrial Networks’ from the drop-down menu of Special Issues.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 April 2022
Initial Decision Date: 1 June 2022
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 July 2022
Final Decision Date: 1 August 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 15 October 2022
Publication Date: December 2022

Guest Editors

Gagangeet Singh Aujla
Durham University, UK

Harpreet S. Dhillon
Virginia Tech, USA

Dusit Niyato
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Chiranjib Saha
Qualcomm, San Diego, CA, USA