Cooperative Cellular UAV-to-Everything (C-U2X) communication based on 5G sidelink for UAV swarms

A swarm of cellular-connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enables new possibilities for emerging services and applications as the UAVs can autonomously coordinate their activities and cooperate to accomplish a given task. Because of spatio-temporal dynamics of swarm topology, robust and reliable network formation with seamless connectivity among UAVs is highly critical for any successful mission. This work focuses on the problem of cooperative and communication-aware UAV channel scheduling of data transmission from a set of target points of interests (PoIs) towards a cellular base station (BS). A novel, cooperative multi-hop communication model based on the C-V2X (Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything) Mode 4 cellular sidelink (PC5) radio interface is presented for efficient UAV data flow scheduling within the swarm. The model design aims at optimizing the cellular communications on UAV-to-UAV (U2U) and UAV-to-Infrastructure (U2I) links via a novel interference-aware scheduling, hence envisioning a new Cellular UAV-to-Everything (C-U2X) communication paradigm. An optimization model is used to solve the centralized version of the problem, while a distributed Dynamic Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (D-CBBA) is proposed to generate the best subchannel scheduling for maximizing data transmission in a distributed setting. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed distributed algorithm is able to extend the cellular infrastructure coverage while improving the multi-hop communications by autonomously adapting to the network conditions.