  Diverse applications have witnessed the prevalence of unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) due to their agility and versatility. Compared with computation
and control, the communication tends to be the bottleneck of the whole UAV
system. Cyber physical system (CPS), which achieves the integration of the
cyber and physical domains, can inspire us to deal with the communication
problems through a cross-disciplinary method. To this end, we first expound the
coupling effects of computation and control to communication. Then, we propose
a novel CPS framework for UAV communications. By extending the dimension of
communication decisions to computation and control, the framework can precisely
orient and settle the communication issues. Further, a quantitative energy
optimization model is established to guide the protocol and algorithm design
for UAV communications. Case simulation results validate the CPS framework in
terms of the energy consumption and communication delay.
