RINGS: Mobility-driven Spectrum-Agile Resilient mmWave Communication Links for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Traffic Management in the Sky

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As the unmanned aviation industry moves towards Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) services, air taxis and air ambulances are expected to become a reality in near future. Handling such a high volume of unmanned air traffic requires innovative solutions for enhanced situational awareness in the airspace. The US Federal Aviation Federal Aviation Administration envisions air tracks specifically reserved for AAM vehicles at altitudes ranging from 500 ft to 2000 ft. Air tracks cross one another at intersections and vehicles may need to share the airspace with other manned and unmanned aerial vehicles. This requires coordination among the vehicles especially during close encounters. Such a coordination requires highly reliable communication links which serve as a substitute for traffic signals on the roads. This proposal addresses this key knowledge gap by investigating strategies for establishing reliable and robust Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication links to support AAM services. The two institutions leading this research project, the University of North Texas and the University of New Mexico, are both Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). With the team’s deep commitment towards broadening participation, the educational initiatives of this project help train the next generation of leaders including those from under-represented and minority groups, contributing to the workforce development both at regional and national levels.This project investigates spectrum-agile millimeter wave-based tunable beamforming strategies needed for establishing reliable and robust V2V communications links to support autonomous flight operations in air corridors along with the supporting radio frequency and mixed signal circuits and steerable antennas. Important research contributions include: (1) investigation of air corridor design and analysis, minimum operational requirements including latency, security, reliability, frequency, and data rates for V2V communications, (2) investigation of software-defined networking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), design of an application layer protocol to enable a logic network controller to manage the physical layer functions of the UAVs in unstable wireless networks, (3) investigation into federated learning-based online trajectory planning to locally adjust the acceleration of a UAV in a dynamic environment, (4) design of frequency-reuse planning for air corridors in 3D space and investigation into spectrum sensing based dynamic channel allocation approaches to maximize network performance, and to ensure reliable and efficient air corridor traffic management, and (5) design of a phased-array antenna and beamforming for the directed wireless data transmission using mm-wave bands, and adaptive beamforming strategies based on the estimated states of the UAVs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.