Abstract—With the popularity of winter tourism, the winter
recreation activities have been increased day by day in alpine
environments. However, large numbers of people and rescuers
are injured and lost in this environment due to the avalanche
accidents every year. Drone-based rescue systems are envisioned
as a viable solution for saving lives in this hostile environment.
To this aim, a European project named ”Smart collaboration
between Humans and ground-aErial Robots for imProving rescuing
activities in Alpine environments (SHERPA)” has been
launched with the objective to develop a mixed ground and
aerial drone platform to support search and rescue activities
in a real-world hostile scenarios. In this paper, we study the
challenges of existing wireless technologies for enabling drone
wireless communications in alpine environment. We extensively
discuss about the positive and negative aspects of the standards
according to the SHERPA network requirements. Then based
on that, we choose Worldwide interoperability for Microwave
Access network (WiMAX) as a suitable technology for drone
communications in this environment. Finally, we present a brief
discussion about the use of operating band for WiMAX and the
implementation issues of SHERPA network. The outcomes of this
research assist to achieve the goal of the SHERPA project.
Index Terms—Drone, Alpine Scenarios, WiMAX.