Research Projects

Natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods can damage cellular infrastructure, making it difficult to locate victims. Current cellular communication methods, such as IMEI numbers and GPs locations, can be damaged, leading to the need for temporary mobile infrastructure for immediate rescue operations. The supple and mobile nature of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers an efficient method of extending coverage from aerial communication. The federal aviation administration (FAA) has expanded its drone fleet to 2.4 million vehicles by 2022. The problem with standalone UAV relay systems (TABs) is their inability to serve hidden users under blockage. To address this, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIs) from 6G can be used to reflect signals in the desired direction with low power consumption. RIs is a passive device that can save battery life time of UAVs. The proposed project combines RIs with UAV (Relay) as a temporary aerial base station (TAB) for serving disaster areas. The main contributions include designing RIs element phase shift using MDP without explicit channel estimation, selecting the number of elements in RIs to transmit the signal to save TAB battery life, designing a scheduling algorithm based on AOI using machine learning tools, and optimizing a precoder to overcome distant dependent pathloss of THz-based (6G) transmission.