Unmanned airborne networks (ANs), as a representative but highly challenging mobile complex information system (CIS), have recently attracted significant interest across a multitude of agencies. This growing interest is stimulated by the advantages of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as transportability, wide coverage and unmanned maneuvering, and also by direct flight-to-flight communication schemes such as small delay, high throughput and flexibility. These advantages give rise to broad novel applications including next-generation air traffic control, search and rescue, surveillance, cargo transportation, and on-demand creation of communication network infrastructure after disasters, among others.
Despite these advantages and broad applications of unmanned ANs, the research is still at its very early stage, due to the highly complex, mobile, and varying AN structure, heterogeneous communication environment, and very limited power and computation resources. In order to overcome these difficulties, it is crucial for academia, industry, and international researchers to cohesively collaborate and share multi-source information and test-beds.
This international seminar will serve as a starting point to propel research progress in this emerging field. We expect that a series of such events will lead to strong international collaboration, funding opportunities, and fruitful research outputs.
