Communication Infrastructure Design for Reliable UAV Operations in Air Mobility Corridors

The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into urban air mobility (UAM) systems necessitates reliable and uninterrupted communication infrastructure to ensure safety, control, and data continuity within designated air corridors. This paper proposes and evaluates four radio repeater deployment strategies to support robust UAV communication in urban environments: Strategy 1 with non-overlapping radio coverage, Strategy 2 with fully overlapping coverage zones, Strategy 3 with alternating redundancy between repeater pairs, and Strategy 4 with full duplication of overlapping coverage. A continuous-time Markov modeling approach is employed to quantify communication availability under varying traffic loads and failure conditions. The strategies are assessed based on infrastructure requirements, reliability performance, and suitability for segmented and non-linear corridor geometries. The results show that increasing redundancy significantly improves reliability: for example, channel unavailability drops from 35% under Strategy 1 (no redundancy) to less than 0.5% under Strategy 4 (full duplication). Strategy 3 achieves a balanced performance, maintaining unavailability below 1% with approximately 50% fewer resources than Strategy 4. A case study in the Greenline district of Astana, Kazakhstan, illustrates the practical application of the framework, demonstrating how hybrid deployment strategies can address different operational and environmental demands. The results show that increasing redundancy significantly enhances availability, with Strategy 3 offering the most efficient balance between reliability and resource use. The proposed methodology provides a scalable foundation for designing resilient UAV communication systems to support future urban airspace operations.