Book Description

"The past few years witnessed a major revolution in the area of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, due to significant technological advances across various drone-related fields ranging from embedded systems to autonomy, control, security, and communications. These unprecedented recent advances in UAV technology have made it possible to widely deploy drones across a plethora of application domains ranging from delivery of goods to surveillance, environmental monitoring, track control, remote sensing, and search and rescue. In fact, recent reports from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) anticipate that sales of UAVs may exceed 7 million in 2020 and many industries are currently investing in innovative drone-centric applications and research. To enable all such applications, it is imperative to address a plethora of research challenges pertaining to drone systems, ranging from navigation to autonomy, control, sensing, navigation, and communications. In particular, the deployment of UAVs in tomorrow's smart cities, is largely contingent upon equipping them with effective means for communications and networking. To this end, in this book, we provide a comprehensive treatment of the wireless communications and networking research challenges and opportunities associated with UAV technology. This treatment begins in this chapter which provides an introduction to UAV technology and an in-depth discussion on the wireless communication and networking challenges associated with the introduction of UAVs"--