Fiber-tethered UAV-enabled adaptive aerial optical access networks and ground-to-air-to-ground optical bridging

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Lee, Ji-Yung and Hwang, Jae Seong and Shin, Gyeongcheol and Lee, Byungju and Jun, Kyungkoo and Kim, Hyunbum and Rajbhandari, Sujan and Chun, Hyunchae (2026) Fiber-tethered UAV-enabled adaptive aerial optical access networks and ground-to-air-to-ground optical bridging. Drones, 10 (4). 236. ISSN 2504-446X (https://doi.org/10.3390/drones10040236)

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Abstract

This work proposes a fiber-tethered UAV-enabled adaptive aerial passive optical network (AA-PON) framework for rapid extension of optical access and backhaul in hard-to-reach or temporarily disrupted environments. The proposed architecture supports two distinct operating modes: (i) an aerial base station (ABS) mode for wide-area service extension and (ii) a ground-to-air-to-ground (G2A2G) mode for targeted high-speed optical bridging to ground terminal units. Unlike conventional UAV relay approaches, the proposed framework is developed as a network-level optical access/backhaul architecture based on tether-assisted aerial nodes and reconfigurable optical topology formation. In the ABS mode, representative Bus, Ring, and Star topologies are analyzed to evaluate serviceability, outage, deployment latency, and scalability as the number of UAV nodes increases. In the G2A2G mode, a stochastic-geometry-based analysis is used to characterize blockage-limited optical serviceability and infrastructure-density trade-offs. To complement the analytical study, a 2 Gb/s proof-of-concept FSO link between two fiber-tethered UAVs is demonstrated as an initial feasibility validation of the end-to-end optical link. The results show that the proposed AA-PON provides a flexible aerial optical networking framework that combines reconfigurable topology support with localized high-capacity optical access extension.

ORCID iDs

Lee, Ji-Yung, Hwang, Jae Seong, Shin, Gyeongcheol, Lee, Byungju, Jun, Kyungkoo, Kim, Hyunbum, Rajbhandari, Sujan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8742-118X and Chun, Hyunchae;
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