Today, 5G networks are being worldwide rolled out, with significant benefits in our economy and society. However, 5G systems alone are not expected to be sufficient for the challenges that 2030 networks will experience, and six-th generation (6G) networks will include also the support of non-terrestrial networks, i.e., satellites and drones that will support the cellular communications from the sky. Since these flying devices will also need to be connected to the terrestrial Internet, part of the wireless link between the satellite and the earth should be dedicated to this backbone connection. Moreover, satellites and drones can also communicate among them to perform multi-hop transmission before reaching the end-user.

The scheduling of all the transmission (from air to ground, and air-to-air) should be accurately designed taking into account a) the limited rate achievable on all these links, b) the time-varying nature of the connections, as drones and satellite (and users) move, c) the possibility that the user receives signals from multiple devices simultaneously as it may have multiple satellites and drones in visibility at the same time. The optimization of the resources (in the time-frequency-space plane) will also take into account difference performance metrics, including data rate and latency.

The thesis will first obtain a description of the 6G scenario including non-terrestrial networks, identifying communication constraints and requirements. Then, a suitable scheduling algorithm to decide which device is transmitting and receiving at any time will be derived. Lastly, the proposed solution with be assessed by simulation tools.

For more information please contact prof. Stefano Tomasin (stefano.tomasin@unipd.it)