Special Issue on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Green Communications and Networking

Supporting explosive data traffic and massive connections is the most critical challenge of 5G and beyond networks. To overcome this challenge, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be exploited as a promising communication platform in future wireless networks due to its inherent advantage of flexibility, mobility, hovering and low cost. In particular, the air-to-air and air-to-ground channels are much better than the ground-to-ground channels when a UAV is used as a base station. In many cases, the communication between a UAV base station and a user equipment can benefit from the line-of-sight (LoS) channel in between. Under such circumstances, mmWave transmission becomes practicable for UAV communications, which could provide much higher data rate.