Multi-UAV Systems: Networks, Services and Energy Management

Dear Colleagues,

The Guest Editors are inviting submissions to a Special Issue of Sensors on the subject area of “Multi-UAV Systems: Networks, Services and Energy Management”.

The presence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, is rapidly growing regarding the capacity to provide a wide range of new commercial applications and services, such as emergency networks, healthcare, surveillance, disasters relief, search and rescue, agriculture, construction, cargo delivery, or even space exploration, and much more.

UAVs can support and exploit 5G capabilities, with cost-effective points of presence, to provide Internet coverage and different network services to ground users.

Implementations are facing important challenges. The duration of the services is usually longer than the battery life-time of the drones. New communication protocols are required. Softwarization technologies, such as NFV and SDN, are gaining traction to support the flexible provision of services on UAVs. Still, multiple technical challenges exist hindering their utilisation in this new study area. Machine Learning is envisioned as a fundamental technology in order to provide self-learning in centralized or distributed configurations.

This Special Issue will deal with novel architectures, strategies, modelling, control, optimization and artificial intelligence for efficient energy consumption and management of UAV systems in terms of the services provided.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to the following list:

• Architectures, infrastructure and systems.
• Energy policies for efficient consumption.
• Distributed configuration and management of UAV networks.
• NFV in UAV systems.
• SDN in UAV systems.
• Routing in UAV systems.
• Self-learning UAV systems.
• UAV systems aware protocols.
• Network infrastructures and instant-networks using UAVs.
• Security and privacy.
• Modelling, performance analysis and optimization.
• Energy aware services orchestration.
• Usage scenarios, testbeds and experimental prototypes.
• Machine learning and big data analytics for UAV.
• Network slicing in UAVs systems.

Prof. Dr. Xavier Hesselbach
Prof. Dr. Francisco Valera
Prof. Dr. Iván Vidal
Prof. Christian Tipantuña
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• UAV
• energy consumption
• protocols
• machine learning
• self-organization
• algorithms
• NFV
• modelling
• optimization
• 5G and beyond
• testbeds
• policies