Adaptive UAV Communications for URLLC: From Preplanned Designs to Real-Time Intelligence

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a key enabler of next-generation wireless networks, particularly for applications that require ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), such as emergency response, industrial automation, and autonomous systems. In these scenarios, maintaining reliable connectivity under strict transmission time constraints is challenging due to dynamic environments, mobility, and limited onboard energy. In particular, communication performance and energy are closely coupled with UAV movement, making trajectory design a critical component of system operation. Most existing approaches rely on offline joint communication and trajectory optimization, where the UAV trajectory and communication parameters are optimized prior to execution based on assumed system information.