Drone Critical Communications

In the near future, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to become fully or partly autonomous, enabling for rescue services, goods delivery, monitoring etc. This will require wide area coverage, while the UAVs must remain fully and safely controllable over the entire flight, even if it is in Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS). The EU-funded Drone Critical Communications (DroC2om) project aims at designing and evaluating an integrated cellular-satellite system architecture concept for high-availability and low-latency data links to UAVs. The project is part of the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR) programme. The research includes experimental radio investigation and system-level simulation.