6G for UAM communications: Challenges and Visions

Abstract

UAM (Urban Air Mobility) is future aerial mobility for passengers and cargo, usually based on eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing aircrafts). UAM communications is a key enabling technology of UAM systems and services, to ensure efficient and safe navigation and to provide network access to passengers. Traditional terrestrial networks, however, are not reliable to fulfill the requirements of UAM since they have not been designed to support airborne mobile users in the three-dimensional space. In the meantime, 6G communications is considered as a good match to UAM due to its vision to cover ground, air, and space. Hence, this paper overviews major challenges of UAM communications and their existing approaches, and then provides future research directions for 6G-based UAM communications.