Modeling of Communication Requirements for Distributed UTM using Stochastic Geometry.

With the rising popularity of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), soon large amounts of UAS are projected to inhabit the low-level airspace. As the skies are getting more and more crowded, it is essential and mandatory to provide up-to-date information on vehicles’ identities, positions and intentions. One of the main use cases of communications among UASs is the coordination and guidance of vehicles, which is referred to as Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM). Despite numerous proposed data link technologies for intra-UAS communication, there is often a lack of clarity regarding the underlying performance requirements. Therefore, the need arises to quantify the required data rate, delay budget and communication range so that suitable data link technologies can be selected. To gain insight into these requirements, we developed a stochastic communication model and applied it to future UAS traffic scenarios for major German cities. These scenarios are based on predictions of UAS traffic demand generated by specific applications, such as parcel delivery. The proposed model estimates that a communication range of less than 500m is sufficient. The delay budget strongly depends on the diameter and the spatial density of the network but remains lower than 110ms. For large cities like Berlin, a data rate of 19Mbps is predicted for the year 2035 which is challenging for many current communication technologies.