Urban Air Mobility Communication Performance Considering Co-Channel Interference

Urban air mobility (UAM) aims to establish a low-altitude transportation system that operates safely and efficiently to mitigate the increasing ground traffic congestion in densely populated areas. Various aircraft types, including passenger aerial vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles, will be used to provide UAM services. In this context, a large number of aircraft are expected to operate in close proximity to each other, leading to challenges in terms of communication throughput and interference. To address these challenges, this article examines UAM communication requirements and the potential applications of cellular networks in the relevant flight environments. UAM wireless connectivity performance is analyzed focusing on cochannel interference and the mathematical expressions for the probability of coverage (PoC) are derived using stochastic geometry. Based on these premises, the improvements in PoC attainable using interference mitigation techniques, such as frequency reuse (FR) and separation distance (SD), are investigated. Then, a PoC enhancement algorithm is presented using a combined FR-SD method. Numerical verification case studies are performed in representative conditions, showing that the proposed method is able to mitigate cochannel interference, significantly reducing computational time and increasing spectrum efficiency.