ABOUT
Giovanni Geraci is an Assistant Professor and Junior Leader Fellow at UPF Barcelona (Spain). He earned a Ph.D. from the UNSW Sydney (Australia) in 2014 and was a Research Scientist at Nokia Bell Labs (Ireland) in 2016-2018. He has co-authored 50+ IEEE publications with 1400+ citations and is co-inventor of a dozen pending patents. He has been an Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. and the IEEE Commun. Letters, and a Workshop Co-Chair at IEEE Globecom’17, Asilomar’18, IEEE ICC’19, and IEEE ICC’20. He delivered a workshop keynote at IEEE PIMRC’18, an industry seminar at IEEE ICC’19, and tutorials at IEEE WCNC’18, IEEE ICC’18, IEEE Globecom’18, and IEEE PIMRC’19. He received the Best Paper Award at IEEE PIMRC’19 for his co-authored work on “Cellular UAV-to-UAV Communications” and the 2018 IEEE ComSoc Outstanding Young Researcher Award for Europe, Middle-East & Africa.
Talk: Cellular UAV-to-UAV Communications
Abstract: As we head towards a pervasive digital transformation aiming at more efficient, automated, and flexible processes, a growing number of tasks are being delegated to machines. Drones—a.k.a. UAVs—, the most mobile of them all, are the logical candidates to take over many such missions. What will it take for drones—and the whole associated ecosystem—to take off? Arguably, infallible command and control channels for safe and autonomous flying, and high-throughput links for multi-purpose live video streaming. Meeting these aspirations may entail a full cellular support, provided through 5G-and-beyond hardware and software upgrades by both operators and UAV manufacturers.
On the other hand, important use-cases exist where direct communication between UAVs, bypassing ground network infrastructure, would be a key enabler. These include autonomous flight of UAV swarms, collision avoidance, and UAV-to-UAV relaying, data transfer, and gathering. Similarly to ground device-to-device communications, UAV-to-UAV communications may also bring benefits in terms of spectral and energy efficiencies, extended cellular coverage, and reduced backhaul demands.
This talk will cover UAV-to-UAV communications in cellular networks, where UAV transmit-receive pairs share the same spectrum with the uplink of cellular ground users. Embracing realistic height-dependent channel models, antenna patterns, and practical power control mechanisms, we will explicitly characterize the performance of both link types, as well as their interplay, to identify the best spectrum sharing mechanism.