UAVs-Enabled Maritime Communications: Opportunities and Challenges

The next generation of wireless communication systems will integrate terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks targeting to cover the undercovered regions, especially connecting the marine activities. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based connectivity solutions offer significant advances to support the conventional terrestrial networks. However, the use of UAVs for maritime communication is still an unexplored area of research. Therefore, this paper highlights different aspects of UAV-based maritime communication, including the basic architecture, various channel characteristics, and use cases. The article, afterward, discusses several open research problems such as mobility management, trajectory optimization, interference management, and beamforming.