From Ground to Air: Making Mobile Networks Ready for Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is expected to be an innovative component of future transportation systems. It introduces great flexibility (additional degrees of freedom) to mobility in 3D space and paves the way to novel design methodologies of wireless communication networks to support both critical and non-critical communications. Main requirements for these networks are high reliability, low latency, and high throughput, barely addressable with existing terrestrial networks unless these are upgraded on the basis of a thorough assessment of coverage capabilities and network planning methodologies. This work investigates the suitability of modern mobile networks, such as 5G and forthcoming 6G, to enable the delicate UAM operations and identifies the gaps to be filled in. The study introduces an enhanced evaluation framework based on a system-level simulator tailored to UAM-specific characteristics in realistic scenarios. Our methodology allows us to determine the minimum number of enhanced Base Stations (eBSs) that must be upgraded to satisfy the considered throughput and BLock Error Rate (BLER) requirements under the adopted system assumptions. The framework integrates a channel-aware selection strategy that prioritizes the upgrades in the subset of base stations that allow the provisioning of the most favorable aggregated link conditions. We explore a variety of realistic deployment scenarios, analyzing the impact of parameters such as UAM Vehicle (UV) population, performance requirements, transmit power, and target BLER on achievable network performance. The results highlight the trade-offs between infrastructure density and service quality, offering practical guidelines for network operators to design UAM-ready deployments along the evolution path toward 6G systems.