Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have entered many fields of application, such as disaster management, search and rescue, localization and mapping, structural inspection,
transportation and delivery of goods, pollution and radiation monitoring, precision farming, etc. In recent years, research has intensified on networks of UAVs (or,
UAV swarms) and, consequently, on enabling the autonomous and collaborative behavior of UAV swarms, e.g., for autonomous simultaneous localization and mapping, navigation, and reconstruction. An important building block in that endeavor is to provide high performance and robust wireless communication capabilities among UAVs (air-to-air) and to/from ground stations or sensors (air-to-ground).

This Special Issue is devoted to reporting novel scientific ideas, approaches, results, and (prototype) solutions/applications on communication in UAV swarms and with ground entities. The particular topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Communication technologies (e.g., WLANs, 4G/5G cellular systems, WANs, delay-tolerant networks)
- Communication architectures (e.g., communication protocols, routing, operating systems, software frameworks, libraries)
- Communication optimization, decision, and learning models (e.g., when to communicate what to whom)
- Interaction of communication with flight mission (e.g., swarm movement, formation, coordination, collaboration, autonomous behaviour)
- Novel networking concepts for UAV swarm communication (including but not limited to software-defined radio and networking (SDR/SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), (multi-access) edge computing (MEC), information-centric networking (ICN))
- Energy consumption and energy-efficient communication
- Security of communication
- Communication performance evaluation
- Experimental and benchmark results on UAV swarm communication for novel applications (e.g., from prototypes, test beds, demonstrations, measurement campaigns)

Special Issue Website at: 
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors/special_issues/communication_networks_UAVs
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2020

For further details on the submission process, please see the instructions for authors at the journal website:
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors/instructions


To submit your manuscript, please click the following link:
http://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload?journal=sensors


In case of questions, please contact the Editorial Office at:
sensors@mdpi.com or miranda.song@mdpi.com