UAV Network and IoT in the Sky for Future Smart Cities

The paradigm of smart cities links the industry of telecommunications directly to sustainable economic growth and high quality of life. To meet this trend, this article develops a 5G IoT network with UAVs for future smart city architecture. We particularly emphasize IoT in the sky in a bid to unify the global world via heterogeneous smart devices through 3D connectivity. In our design, UAVs form a 5G hierarchical IoT network in the sky by connecting to a number of base stations on the ground. Simulation results reveal that the leader UAV has a significant impact on the performance of the whole system, and the proposed approach has an obvious advantage over the existing ones.