Performance and Reliability of 5G Communications for USV-UAV Critical Applications

With the development of fifth generation (5G) and 5G and beyond (B5G) mobile communications, unmanned vehicles are gaining attention. In critical applications, such as rescue operations, cooperative operation between unmanned vehicles, like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), is required. In order to implement these applications, reliable communications between the vehicles become necessary. In this paper, based on propagation results obtained by measurements, we evaluate the communications performance between a USV and a UAV, considering metrics like the Block Error Rate (BLER), the end-to-end delay, the throughput and the packet loss ratio. The results show that in order to satisfy the reliability requirements for critical communications established by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) index needs to be carefully optimized. The obtained results are of great importance to evaluate whether current 5G deployments can support critical communications for UAV-USV communications.