5G is supposed to provide effective machine-to-machine communications for robots, sensors, healthcare, smart meters, cameras, cars, drones and so on — all with different demands. It is said that 5G will empower the universal boom for entertainment, research, and business. In addition, 5G will meet the demands of many industries – including consumer electronics, avionics, IoT, etc. to name a few. However, the “one-size-fits-all” network solution is no longer applicable for all use cases and services to every device, everywhere.

How will Network Slicing Benefit in 5G Technology?

To empower newer possibilities, 5G networks will have to support diverse and stringent requirements of latency, throughput, capacity, and availability. With its unified design, 5G, an integrated connectivity fabric, offers an exciting promise of being able to Slice the Network to serve a wide range of applications with very distinct reliability and throughput requirements.

With this Network Slicing concept, operators can enable different deployments and architectural flavors for various business models, use cases or service groups. They can run all network instances in parallel on a shared network infrastructure.

Considering this, IoT sensors, automated vehicles, augmented reality (AR), games and drones seem to be perfect examples of existing technology that can leverage 5G soon.  Let us understand the impact of 5G in Drones operations.

Why Should Drones Utilize the Upcoming 5G Technology?

Cellular connectivity is the key technology for drone operations such as command and control, media sharing and autonomous flying. Drones can be controlled exclusively by a high-speed, low-latency 5G network to support diverse drone communication needs. Drones working on a high-speed internet also can complement the activities of a blue-collar workforce.

How Does 5G Slicing Work in Drone Operations?

5G slicing can be used for enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMMB) and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (uRLLC), to Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) applications. Dynamic network slicing lets 5G applications, running on a flexible zone on the network pull varying, adaptable levels of bandwidth and reliability.

Use Cases of 5G in Drones

Some of the companies have successfully carried out drone flight commands via a 5G connection, using a dedicated ‘network slice’ of a pre-5G network, over LTE radio access. Consequently, sections of the 5G could be PROTECTED and could, therefore keep operating when the rest of the network was encumbered.

Following are some standard, known set of drone use cases and some more are still taking shape, yet less explored:

If you can adopt 5G network slicing to enable drones-as-a-service, you can provide pretty much anything as a service. 5G is yet to be enacted as a standard, and frequencies and equipment haven’t been decided upon terrestrially. The evolving drone industry needs to use standard information models and metrics to deliver the set of services that customers are expecting, and for this, a collaboration between regulators, network providers, technology providers, software-development organizations and open source groups are required.

Conclusion

With network slicing, 5G cellular and onboard intelligence will facilitate safe consumer and commercial drone deployments. One can do it with LTE optimization as well, but with network slicing of 5G, serving all segments in parallel will be possible without any disruption. 5G will empower wide-scale deployments of mission-critical drone use cases.

Qualcomm is investing in pioneering 5G technologies to match extreme requirements and pushing 5G from standardization to commercialization. It leads the effort of integration of advancing drone technologies in small form factor to enable current and future drone and UAV services in controlled and uncontrolled airspace environments.

eInfochips provides solutions for drone industry based on Qualcomm SD212, SD410, SD600, SD625 and SD820 via Eragon solutions. To know more about Eragon Solutions for Drone industry, get in touch with us.