4G/5G performance of a multi-RAT UAV for medical parcel delivery

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being developed and researched to be used in different areas and diverse use cases. The delivery of medical parcels is an emergency service that avails from the air traffic for the fast delivery of critical health content. Besides 5G networks being the target communication technology for the UAV parcel transport, the infrastructure is still not optimized for ground-level User Equipments (UEs). Using multiple Radio Access Technology (RAT) by UAVs is an alternative solution for scenarios where the 5G network is unstable or not yet fully deployed. In this paper, we present bench-marking of 5G and 4G networks on unideal radio scenarios to understand the real latency and throughput delivered by these technologies in worst-case scenarios. The results show that the 5G network can provide the necessary Quality of Service (QoS) for UAV operations even with Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) in the order of -90. In comparison, the preliminary data for the 4G network validates that the 4G network could not provide the required latency.