Cellular-enabled aerial vehicles: GSMA paper explores cellular support for drones

The GSMA North America Vertical Application Taskforce (NAVA) has published a new whitepaper about cellular-enabled Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UASs) reflecting the regional ecosystem’s perspective. The intended audience for this paper includes stakeholders in cellular-connected and networked UAS ecosystems.

The objective of this work was to discuss the commercial barriers to adoption and advancement of cellular connected UAS. The paper is intended to be a resource for a multi-functional audience in the connected UAS space and serve as a common ground for facilitating communication across the ecosystem for the purpose of advancing the industry.

Belonging to the UAV family, drones have been available commercially already for years. They are useful in many activities from hobby-based photographing to the most critical public safety applications, and they are typically based on short-range wireless connectivity such as Wi-Fi. Along the increasing demand to serve evolving use cases, the cellular systems are becoming increasingly relevant option for managing the command-and-control link of UAVs.

UAS in turn refers to the combination of the vehicle or aircraft such as drone, the controller, and the links that connect them.

The whitepaper presents the principles and advances of cellular UAS in North America, and outlines how the mobile networks can support the market today. Some of the commercial UAS categories are the delivery and collection of information, delivery of goods, and in the future, also the delivery of people. The paper cites ongoing activities and open needs to advance the scale of the cellular connected UAS ecosystem for the purpose of supporting commercialization of the core technologies needed to accomplish these tasks.

Access the white paper here