UAV-Assisted Internet of Vehicles Over Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrum: Architecture, Intelligent Resource Management, and Challenges

Benefited from their flexibility and on-demand deployment capability, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as critical aerial communication platforms in future Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However, limited spectrum resources can lead to unsatisfying data rate of IoV, which thus incur large latency, especially under congested IoV network conditions. Although UAVs and road side units (RSUs) can work within the same spectrum and increase spectral efficiency, mutual interference becomes unavoidable. To this end, this article develops a heterogeneous network architecture, in which a UAV-assisted IoV system coexists with a Wi-Fi system: the RSUs can properly occupy unlicensed spectrum to increase the capacity of the UAV-assisted IoV system while mitigating interference, without affecting the performance of the Wi-Fi system. A case study of resource management over licensed and unlicensed spectrum is investigated under the proposed architecture, where time and power are jointly optimized to maximize the sum user satisfaction of the system. We further provide an intelligent solution to tackle the problem in the considered case study. Simulations demonstrate that our proposed case can efficiently improve the sum user satisfaction of the system. Key challenges and opportunities for UAV-assisted IoV over licensed and unlicensed spectrum are discussed, while recommendable future research directions are investigated.