The rapid development of the low-altitude economy has imposed unprecedented demands on wireless infrastructure to accommodate large-scale drone deployments and facilitate intelligent services in dynamic airspace environments. However, unlocking its full potential in practical applications presents significant challenges. Traditional aerial systems predominantly focus on air-ground communication services, often neglecting the integration of sensing, computation, control, and energy-delivering functions, which hinders the ability to meet diverse mission-critical demands. Besides, the absence of systematic low-altitude airspace planning and management exacerbates issues regarding dynamic interference in three-dimensional space, coverage instability, and scalability. To overcome these challenges, a comprehensive framework, termed low-altitude wireless network (LAWN), has emerged to seamlessly integrate communication, sensing, computation, control, and air traffic management into a unified design. This article provides a comprehensive overview of LAWN systems, introducing LAWN system fundamentals and the evolution of functional designs. Subsequently, we delve into performance evaluation metrics and review critical concerns surrounding privacy and security in the open-air network environment. Finally, we present the cutting-edge developments in airspace structuring and air traffic management, providing insights to facilitate the practical deployment of LAWNs.
@article{arxiv.2509.11607,
title = {Low-Altitude Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey},
author = {Jun Wu and Yaoqi Yang and Weijie Yuan and Wenchao Liu and Jiacheng Wang and Tianqi Mao and Lin Zhou and Yuanhao Cui and Fan Liu and Geng Sun and Yiyan Ma and Nan Wu and Dezhi Zheng and Jindan Xu and Nan Ma and Zhiyong Feng and Wei Xu and Dusit Niyato and Chau Yuen and Xiaojun Jing and Zhiguo Shi and Bo Ai and Shi Jin and Dong In Kim and Jiangzhou Wang and Ping Zhang and Hao Yin and Jun Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.11607},
year = {2026}
}