부산대학교 도서관

This article describes the envisioned interactions between information and communication technology (ICT) and the aerospace industries to serve autonomous devices for next-generation aerial parcel delivery networks. The autonomous features of fleet elements of the delivery network are enabled by the increased throughput, improved coverage, and near-user computation capabilities of vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets). A high-altitude platform station (HAPS), located around 20 km above the ground level in a quasi-stationary manner, serves as the main enabler of the vision we present. In addition to the sensing potential of the HAPS nodes, the use of communication, computing, and caching capabilities demonstrates the attainability of the ambitious goal of serving a fully autonomous aerial fleet capable of addressing instantaneous user demands and enabling supply chain management interactions with delivery services in low-latency settings.