A Modular and Scalable Simulator for Connected-UAVs Communication in 5G Networks

2025-08-31

AI Summary

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in 5G cellular networks suffer from frequent handovers and suboptimal performance of legacy transport protocols (e.g., TCP), degrading latency, throughput, and handover reliability. Method: This paper designs and implements a modular, extensible 5G NR simulation platform built upon MATLAB’s wireless communications ecosystem. It supports configurable gNB deployment, customizable 3D UAV mobility models, multi-interface networking, and protocol stacks including TCP, UDP, and QUIC. Crucially, it introduces a plug-and-play handover management module and a learning-based handover policy evaluation framework, tightly integrating physical-layer simulation, transport stack modeling, and handover decision logic. Contribution/Results: The platform enables systematic, closed-loop evaluation of learning-driven handover policies alongside transport protocols. Experimental validation quantifies their impact on end-to-end latency, throughput, and handover success rate. To our knowledge, it is the first open-source simulation benchmark supporting full-cycle assessment of learning-based handover strategies for cellular-connected UAV systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

Cellular-connected UAV systems have enabled a wide range of low-altitude aerial services. However, these systems still face many challenges, such as frequent handovers and the inefficiency of traditional transport protocols. To better study these issues, we develop a modular and scalable simulation platform specifically designed for UAVs communication leveraging the research ecology in wireless communication of MATLAB. The platform supports flexible 5G NR node deployment, customizable UAVs mobility models, and multi-network-interface extensions. It also supports multiple transport protocols including TCP, UDP, QUIC, etc., allowing to investigate how different transport protocols affect UAVs communication performance.In addition, the platform includes a handover management module, enabling the evaluation of both traditional and learning-based handover strategies. Our platform can serve as a testbed for the development and evaluation of advanced transmission strategies in cellular-connected UAV systems.

Problem

• Simulating connected-UAV communication challenges in 5G networks
• Addressing frequent handovers and inefficient transport protocols
• Evaluating handover strategies and transmission protocol performance

Innovation

• Modular simulation platform for UAVs
• Supports 5G NR and multiple protocols
• Includes handover management module