Revolutionary Advantages of 5G Communications

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Disasters or emergency situations require substantial network resources to sustain and provide wireless connectivity rapidly. The exponential growth in mobile data traffic and in the number of wireless devices has prompted a global demand for fifth generation (5G) cellular networks.
The 5G technology can make a substantial change in various fields. One of them is drone base stations. Such stations have started to become a reality, and they have the potential to be employed in a variety of scenarios, from public safety communications, through data collection in (IoT) applications, to uses in disaster or emergency scenarios.
Accurate models for air-to-ground links between the drones and ground users are currently investigated by researchers, who are consistently performing coverage analysis, studying 3D drone placements, as well as efficient trajectory designs.
Deployments of actual drone base stations have been demonstrated recently. The loss of connectivity, as in the case of Hurricane Maria disaster, can have significant detrimental impact on emergency response and disaster recovery efforts.
As one remedy for this, AT&T deployed for the first time, its Flying COW (Cell on Wings) drone to establish LTE cell-sites and restore connectivity in parts of Puerto Rico.
The use of large-bandwidth millimeter wave frequency bands, (between 30 and 300 GHz) becomes a good candidate for next-generation 5G wireless networks, suggests broadcastingcable.com.
Operating at millimeter wave frequencies is also attractive for drone communications, because drones can establish line-of-sight connections with the ground users by adjusting their locations and supporting directional transmissions at very high rates (e.g., to support 4K video traffic) by utilizing the large bandwidths.
In the multitude of scenarios where wireless networks are deployed in hard-to-reach places, conventional battery charging becomes infeasible. Mobile users may also choose to avoid the disruption of battery replacement or recharging if there are other means to providing continuous power supply. These considerations have led to increased interest in energy-harvesting wireless communications. In particular, radio frequency energy harvesting from ambient electromagnetic signals, or dedicated energy beamforming sources via wireless power transfer, have each become viable approaches. Such technology holds the promise to enable drones that are equipped with wireless power transmitters which energize sensors on the ground and collect data.