Using NR Sidelink for UAV Swarm Internal Communication

The focus of this thesis is to provide an up-to-date overview of UAV device-to-device communications using NR Sidelink. The main objective is to identify the enabling factors for establishing an internal communication network inside a drone swarm, using the 3GPP standardized NR Sidelink communications.

The thesis mainly focuses on the study of functionalities included in the Sidelink standard. It includes a literature review that higlights the functionalities in the Sidelink standard while evaluating its suitability for UAV swarm internal communications. Moreover, MATLAB simulations were implemented to estimate the required update frequency for routing within a multi-hop network when applied to the UAV swarm internal communications.

The results reveal that the NR Sidelink standard has favorable physical and link layer procedures for UAV communications inside a swarm. However, the standard lacks certain functionalities required to fully enable internal communications, such as support for beamforming or network management. The NR Sidelink standard does not define, but enables network layer routing, and this has been studied through simulation. Comparison of simulation results against the capacity of NR Sidelink indicates that the control overhead does not overly burden the available resource pool and the updates for the routing decrease the required transmission power.