Aerial vehicles (AVs) such as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft make aerial passenger transportation a reality in urban environments. However, their communication connectivity is still under research to realize their safe and full-scale operation. This paper envisages a multi-connectivity (MC) enabled aerial network to provide ubiquitous and reliable service to AVs. Vertical heterogeneous networks with direct air-to-ground (DA2G) and air-to-air (A2A) communication, high altitude platforms (HAPs), and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are considered. We evaluate the end-to-end (E2E) multi-hop reliability and network availability of the downlink of AVs for remote piloting scenarios, and control/telemetry traffic. Command and control (C2) connectivity service requires ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), therefore we analyse E2E reliability and latency under the finite blocklength (FBL) regime. We explore how different MC options satisfy the demanding E2E connectivity requirements taking into account antenna radiation patterns and unreliable backhaul links. Since providing seamless connectivity to AVs is very challenging due to the line-of-sight (LoS) interference and reduced gains of downtilt ground base station (BS) antennas, we use coordinated multi-point (CoMP) among ground BSs to alleviate the inter-cell interference. Furthermore, we solve an optimization problem to select the best MC path under the quality of service (QoS) constraints. We maximize spectral efficiency (SE) to specify the optimum MC path with the minimum number of required links. Based on the simulation results, we find out that even with very efficient interference mitigation, MC is the key enabler for safe remote piloting operations.

There is a lack of research on the analysis of peruser traffic in cellular networks, for deriving and following traffic-aware network management. In fact, the legacy design approach, in which resource provisioning and operation control are performed based on the cell-aggregated traffic scenarios, are not so energy- and cost-efficient and need to be substituted with user-centric predictive analysis of mobile network traffic and proactive network resource management. Here, we shed light on this problem by designing traffic prediction tools that utilize standard machine learning (ML) tools, including long shortterm memory (LSTM) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) on top of per-user data. We present an expansive empirical evaluation of the designed solutions over a real network traffic dataset. Within this analysis, the impact of different parameters, such as the time granularity, the length of future predictions, and feature selection are investigated. As a potential application of these solutions, we present an ML-powered Discontinuous reception (DRX) scheme for energy saving. Towards this end, we leverage the derived ML models for dynamic DRX parameter adaptation to user traffic. The performance evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of LSTM over ARIMA in general, especially when the length of the training time series is high enough, and it is augmented by a wisely-selected set of features. Furthermore, the results show that adaptation of DRX parameters by online prediction of future traffic provides much more energy-saving at low latency cost in comparison with the legacy cell-wide DRX parameter adaptation.

Aerial vehicles (AVs) such as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) make aerial passenger transportation a reality in urban environments. However, their communication connectivity is still under research to realize their safe and full-scale operation, which requires stringent end-to-end (E2E) reliability and delay. In this paper, we evaluate reliability and delay for the downlink communication of AVs, i.e., remote piloting, control/telemetry traffic of AVs. We investigate direct air-to-ground (DA2G) and air-to-air (A2A) communication technologies, along with high altitude platforms (HAPs) to explore the conditions of how multi-connectivity (MC) options satisfy the demanding E2E connectivity requirements under backhaul link bottleneck. Our considered use case is ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) under the finite blocklength (FBL) regime due to the nature of downlink control communication to AVs. In our numerical study, we find that providing requirements by single connectivity to AVs is very challenging due to the line-of-sight (LoS) interference and reduced gains of downtilt ground base station (BS) antenna. We also find that even with very efficient interference mitigation, existing cellular networks designed for terrestrial users are not capable of meeting the URLLC requirements calling for MC solutions.