Project COM2Sky

Aviation industry is experiencing a tremendous transformation. Firstly, the number of passenger aircraft is increasing continuously and needs of connectivity services are more and more demanded by passengers. Secondly, different flying vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as flying taxis e.g. in urban air mobility (UAM), and high-altitude platforms (HAPs) are becoming participants of airspace at different altitudes. Thirdly, satellite technologies are evolving in an unprecedented manner. Communication and computation technologies are vital to unlock potentials of the recent advances and create new services. Hence, the Communications and Computation in the Sky (Com2Sky) project aims at solutions to enable reliable connectivity and efficient computation capabilities in the sky with novel radio technology solutions, resource allocation schemes and cloud technologies.

This project focuses on three domains that all share aerial communication elements. This project addresses the need to enable communication and computation platforms in the sky to serve for enabling (1) urban air mobility (UAM), (2) high data rate air to ground communication for passenger aircraft and (3) IoT services especially in rural or maritime areas with the help of new satellite constellations, HAPs and UAVs. Key issues that will be addressed are as follows:

■ Design of an aerial edge/cloud computation system over HAPS and satellites which span terrestrial cloud resources for both flying users and industrial IoT in rural areas,

■ Design of aerial ICT system considering computation and communication resources jointly in a 3D environment to enable services for UAM, passenger communications and industrial IoT,

■ Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based mobility and interference management for UAVs,

■ Analysis of technical impact of UAV and passenger aircraft on cellular communications,

■ Design of mesh network considering Air-to-Air(A2A) and Air-to-Ground(A2G) communications,

■ Implementation and development of equipment, hardware (HW) and software (SW) solutions for aerial clouds and A2G communications,

■ Integration of the equipment in an aircraft and in ground base stations of cellular network,

■ Impact on standardisation of new radio technologies for aerial communications and regulations on air traffic management and urban air mobility,

■ Test campaign including laboratory, ground and flight test to validate the technology and A2G communication link