Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Sensor Networks

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, drone-embarked real-time sensing applications have bloomed, ranging from aerial surveillance to remote infrastructure state monitoring, terrain surveying, etc. Those applications demand robust and high-bandwidth communication coverage, even at remote areas, also imposing high computation demands, quite often in a distributed environment involving cloud and edged computing. Further, drone command and control, especially for beyond line of sight (BVLOS) applications, demands low-latency robust communication of telemetry, command orders, and quite often video for the remote pilot. Moreover, drones are gaining autonomy and capabilities to coordinate their operations, either to avoid conflicts or to perform missions cooperatively (i.e., drone swarms). Finally, new safety requirements are being imposed on drones’ operations, to be able to use them in higher-population areas. One of the most relevant requirements is the need to integrate themselves with UAV traffic management (UTM) systems, formed of a collection of distributed preflight and along-flight traffic coordination services demanding a bidirectional datalink to the drones and/or the pilots.

Summarizing, drones can be seen as aerial (mobile) IoT sensing platforms with different communication/coordination needs both for operating safely and for performing their very diverse intended missions.

The aim of this Special Issue is to solicit papers from academia and industry researchers with original and innovative works on all aspects of UAV sensor networks, ranging from communication architectures to sensing/information topologies and mission coordination, which review and report on the start-of-the-art, highlight challenges, and point to future directions.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• 5G for UAV sensor networks
• Ad hoc UAV sensor networks
• Real-time Information processing in UAV sensor networks
• Cooperative sensing for UAV sensor networks
• UTM architectures, communication needs
• Interaction with UAV sensor networks
• Testbed, benchmark, and simulation studies in UAV sensor networks
• Security and privacy issues in UAV sensor networks

Dr. Ana Bernardos
Dr. Juan Besada
Guest Editors

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• UAV sensor networks
• drone applications
• cooperative sensing