Bridging Simulation and Real-World for Autonomous UAVs in 5G RAN

Although the integration between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Radio Access Network (RAN) applications is envisioned to enable a variety of new use cases and services, several practical aspects related to autonomous operations over cellular systems are still largely unexplored due to difficulties in testing and validating such integration in the real world. In this paper, we bridge the gap between simulation and real-world applications by introducing a new framework that combines real-world robotic controllers and 5th generation (5G) cellular stacks with channel and flight simulation. We consider a holistic approach where we use ArduPilot as the flight controller and OpenAirInterface (OAI) and srsRAN as the 5G cellular stacks to provide a unified solution for developing and experimenting with UAV s for cellular applications. We utilize ArduPilot Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) to simulate and control the mobility of UAVs, while OAI-RFSim and srsRAN are used to model channel conditions. Our framework is particularly useful for developing data-driven solutions that require (i) a large amount of data collected under realistic operational conditions to learn effective control policies; and (ii) a sandbox and safe testing environment that enables exploration of the action space. By addressing a UAV coverage problem and developing a greedy heuristic, we demonstrate how our framework can be used to create and test algorithms in a simulated environment, showcasing its potential as a bridge to real-world applications.