Ericsson Looks to Identify Uncertified Drones with AI and Machine Learning

In their paper "Drones and networks: Ensuring safe and secure operations", researchers Dr. Xingqin Lin, Henrik Rydén and Sakib Bin Redhwan describe how mobile networks are well suited to support low-altitude drone communication and to be integrated with drone traffic management systems to enhance the safety and security of drone operations. Many use cases require drones to transmit video feeds to their flight controllers, imposing heavy uplink traffic load on the networks. Therefore, it is important that mobile networks identify if a user equipment (UE) is a drone UE or a regular ground UE, in order to provide the right service optimization for drone UEs while ensuring the performance of ground UEs is not impacted. Aerial radio channels have a higher likelihood of line-of-sight propagation due to the absence of obstacles, so an uplink signal transmitted from a drone UE may reach multiple neighboring non-serving base stations and thus cause increased uplink interference. As soon as an uncertified drone is detected, interference mitigation techniques can then be initiated.