GSMA Drone Interest Group – Deep Dive #1 – How cellular networks are capable to handle the UAV layer
The GSMA Drone Interest Group hosted their first deep dive session on 25th May from 3pm to 5pm BST (UK). The session provided a brief overview of the UAS related activities in 3GPP by Helka-Liina Määttänen from Ericsson, also a 3GPP RAN2 delegate.
We also heard about real life experiences supporting drones from the Mobile Operator perspective, presented by Francesca Stockton, Product Manager for Verizon Robotics. She touched upon network quality and management, use cases and related performance and also spectrum.
Helka-Liina Määttänen
3GPP RAN2 delegate, Ericsson
Francesca Stockton
Aviation Connectivity Product Manager, Verizon Robotics
Francesca Stockton is an influential, results-oriented technology leader in the aerial cellular technology, drone, and robotics industries. She currently works as the Aviation Connectivity Product Manager for Skyward, a Verizon company. Through her keen business acumen and unique background, she is leading efforts on the development of cellular network services for use in the aviation industry, with a special focus on the integration of drones into the National Airspace System (NAS). As an industry expert, she supports several teams including R&D, product development, policy and regulatory, and flight testing to assess how network features, services, and configurations work in the sky.
Prior to joining Skyward, Francesca was a hardware and applications engineer in contract product design and consulting. Currently, she is focused on 5G and advanced network services, and how this transformational technology can be applied to aviation. Francesca holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Washington State University. She is from the Pacific Northwest and is currently based out of Atlanta, GA.
Barbara Pareglio
Executive Director for Advanced Air Mobility and IoT Technical Director, GSMA
Barbara has over 20 years of experience in the mobile industry. She has been part of the GSMA Internet of Things Programme since 2014, working on several aspects of the IoT such as the development of the Mobile IoT Technologies (LTE-M, NB-IoT), GSMA IoT Security Guidelines, GSMA Drone Interest Group and looking at a variety of emerging technologies, like machine learning/AI and edge computing, for helping the mobile industry to create trusted solutions for the IoT. Before joining the GSMA Barbara worked in R&D in several areas of telecommunications, including Intelligent Networks, IMS, Service Enabling and M2M/IoT. She also participates in and actively contributed to several standards.
The GSMA Internet of Things helps operators to fully realise the opportunity in the IoT, operators must deliver secure IoT networks as well as scalable value added data services for the world’s industry and machines beyond connectivity. This is to be achieved by industry collaboration, appropriate regulation, optimising networks as well as developing key enablers to support the growth of IoT.