Ground-to-UAV Integrated Network: Low Latency Communication over Interference Channel

We present a novel and first-of-its-kind information-theoretic framework for the key design consideration and implementation of a ground-to-UAV (G2U) communication network to minimize end-to-end transmission delay in the presence of interference. The proposed framework is useful as it describes the minimum transmission latency for an uplink ground-to-UAV communication must satisfy while achieving a given level of reliability. To characterize the transmission delay, we utilize Fano's inequality and derive the tight upper bound for the capacity for the G2U uplink channel in the presence of interference, noise, and potential jamming. Subsequently, given the reliability constraint, the error exponent is obtained for the given channel. Furthermore, a relay UAV in the dual-hop relay mode, with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol, is considered, for which we jointly obtain the optimal positions of the relay and the receiver UAVs in the presence of interference. Interestingly, in our study, we find that for both the point-to-point and relayed links, increasing the transmit power may not always be an optimal solution for delay minimization problems. Moreover, we prove that there exists an optimal height that minimizes the end-to-end transmission delay in the presence of interference. The proposed framework can be used in practice by a network controller as a system parameters selection criteria, where among a set of parameters, the parameters leading to the lowest transmission latency can be incorporated into the transmission. The based analysis further set the baseline assessment when applying Command and Control (C2) standards to mission-critical G2U and UAV-to-UAV(U2U) services.