THz-enabled UAV communications: Motivations, results, applications, challenges, and future considerations

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Terahertz (THz) communication are promising technologies envisioned to support the race towards enhanced performance with respect to data rate, reliability, coverage, etc. Research on the merger of these two technologies for meeting the different application requirements in future wireless communication is gaining momentum, which could facilitate its deployment for applications envisioned for the sixth-generation wireless systems and beyond. Enabling UAV communication in the THz band is quite challenging owing to the highly mobile nature of UAVs and the strict line-of-sight requirements of communication in the high frequency bands. Nevertheless, very recent research in terms of experimentation and modelling has shown the merits of THz-enabled UAV communication in several critical and peculiar cases which reveals its great potential. Thus, this paper presents a survey of the literature on the experimental results, numerous potential use cases and the corresponding research challenges of THz-UAV with a view to providing insights into the myriad of opportunities in this domain of aerial wireless communications.