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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\u201cThat will be felt particularly hard in big cities with large populations and fewer spaces to add more cell phone towers,\u201d says Associate Professor Ying Wang who studies wireless communications at Stevens Department of Systems Engineering. \u201cIn busy cities \u2014 especially during things like traffic management, disasters or search-and-rescue \u2014 we need fast, reliable wireless communication,\u201d she adds. But regular cell towers don\u2019t always provide strong coverage everywhere and networks can get overloaded or damaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wang\u2019s solution to the problem is using a swarm of drones, which can serve as temporary cell phone towers during an outage or a slow network performance episode. \u201cInstead of fixed towers, the aerial vehicles move and act as distributed radio units,\u201d she explains. Think of them as pop-up cell phone network or a network-on-demand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Working together with Stevens PhD candidate, Ishan Aryendu, Wang designed a network of such flying cell phone towers that can be quickly deployed when ad-hoc connectivity is needed. Named AURA-GreeN, for Aerial Utility-driven Route Adaptation for Green cooperative Network, the system operates as a small application, called an xApp, within a smart network controller that runs on the modern Open-RAN framework, which provides the mobile network architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The system continuously monitors real-time network conditions \u2014 such as signal quality, interference and traffic load\u2014and uses that information to make intelligent decisions. Specifically, it determines which aerial vehicles should transmit data, how to divide and allocate the available wireless spectrum, how to route the data through the network and how to operate within overall power limits. \u201cThe system decides where they should go and how to use the wireless spectrum, so data gets from source to destination quickly and reliably,\u201d explains Wang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the same time, AURA-GreeN carefully balances multiple goals: keeping communication delays low, using spectrum efficiently, maintaining reliable service and ensuring energy-efficient operation. \u201cIt keeps the \u2018age of information\u2019 low, meaning the data you see is always very fresh and closely reflects what is happening right now,\u201d says Aryendu. \u201cWe saw that there was a significant improvement in the age of information, about 460 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wang and Aryendu outlined their idea in a recent study, published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology in February 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These flying cell phone towers can also be deployed during concerts and other big social events, which often strain mobile networks, says Aryendu. \u201cDuring the Super Bowl, there was a bunch of drones equipped with cameras flying all over the place, capturing video footage from the event. All those drones could serve a double purpose by providing connectivity to the users inside the stadium without overwhelming the existing communication infrastructure. This makes our idea even more feasible, because we are not using extra energy to fly the drones; we are piggybacking on drones that already provide the coverage of the event.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although the main goal of the AURA-GreeN system is to improve coverage, reliability and data freshness in dynamic urban aerial scenarios or during natural disasters, the concept challenges the traditional view of the communication infrastructure, Wang notes. \u201cThe majority of the day-to-day communication infrastructure was built on the ground, which is normal and expected, because the majority of the human activities take place on the ground. In the future that doesn\u2019t have to be the case. We can deploy these flying networks using drones and other flying vehicles like air taxis.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a drone-based system designed to provide temporary wireless coverage during network outages or periods of high demand. The system, named AURA-GreeN, deploys a coordinated swarm of aerial vehicles that function as mobile cell towers, intelligently managing spectrum allocation, data routing and energy use in real time. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-front-page-slider","category-unmanned-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Stevens-Istitute-of-Tech-2-edit.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34718,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34715\/revisions\/34718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateaviationjournal.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}