UBSpot: A Universal Broadband Flying Hotspot Experimental Testbed Toward Programmable Aerial-Ground Wireless Networks

UAV-assisted wireless networking has been envisioned as a key technology to provide pervasive, elastic and spectrally-efficient network services in 5G-Beyond and Wireless Internet of Things (W-IoT). To enable rapid and repeatable experimentations for UAV-assisted wireless networking, in this article we propose UBSpot, a universal broadband flying hotspot for software-defined aerial-ground wireless networking in the microwave and mmWave frequency bands. The major components of UBSpot are described, including Data Plane, Mobility Plane, and Control Plane. A software-defined prototype of UBSpot is also presented.