# Performance of Sensor Data Process Offloading on 5G-Enabled UAVs
## 1 Introduction  
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly developing and they are already being investigated and chosen for a wide range of applications. The unique mobility, site reachability, and emerging ability to interact with the environment have constituted UAVs to be at the center of research for academic institutions and various organizations [1, 2]. One central point of the current discussions around UAV applications revolves around use cases that require wide-area connectivity [3, 4]. With wide-area connectivity, UAV applications will be less dependent on infrastructure and may even be automated for recurrent assignments. As such, the possibility for automation and infrastructure-free deployments opens a vast field of applications regarding UAVs as a sensing platform. Power line inspection, road inspections, security surveillance, wind power plant inspection, and other potential applications could be some of the most notable ones [5]. Some of the most important benefits that the aforementioned applications will experience revolve around the capabilities of the UAV sensing platform. Cellular-connected UAVs can access the extensive computational power of the edge cloud and can be assisted by centralized processing schemes while maintaining constant connectivity [4, 6]. This potential for centralized intelligence makes it possible to handle numerous UAVs or UAV swarms as an interconnected system and perform various types of centralized data processing, constituting the most traditional definition of cloud robotics. The edge cloud promises vast improvements in the real-time execution of computationally intensive algorithms, such as object detection and others [7]. As a result, instead of always being outfitted with powerful computational resources, UAVs can now be developed with fewer computationalcapabilities and concentrate on equipping such platforms to better serve the purpose of the desired application. The possibilities of cellular-connected UAVs are also expressed by concepts such as extended reality teleoperation and others [8]. For mobile robots, and especially UAVs connected to cellular networks, providing a reliable communication link is a vital prerequisite for a mission to be successful. Challenges and current limitations revolving around this topic have to be thoroughly documented and tested in real-life conditions [6; 9]. Theoretical limits and practical integration problems are constantly being examined and evaluated by academia and various organizations involved in this topic. Some of the most notable ones would be the 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Furthermore, the 5G cellular network offers various improvements to its predecessor, the 4G long-term evolution (LTE). Throughout this study, the capabilities of a 5G-enabled UAV are described, studied, and evaluated by targeting a UAV that is employed as a sensing platform. Initially, it is best to point out the important factors that affect a 5G-enabled UAV when serving as a sensing platform [5]. One may argue that the round trip latency and jitter measurements are the most crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) for robotics applications, particularly when the transmission of the data packets encapsulates control and command data packets, which thus directly influences the behavior of the robot. Besides that, a crucial characteristic of such applications is the throughput capabilities of the platform. In this article, the uplink and downlink throughput capabilities of the UAV, which is defined to be a user equipment (UE) entity, are analyzed. Overall, 5G offers a significant list of improvements over LTE. Some notable ones would be the 5G core, enhanced uplink and downlink performance, additional quality of service (QoS) features, the ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) feature, and so on.