UAV Networks : Design Considerations

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have come a long way, from starting out as military reconnais- sance vehicles to a popular hobbyist’s tool. Significant research and development efforts from the commercial drone industry have significantly improved commercial UAVs and has got the wireless network and communications design community thinking about the possibility of realization and deployment of UAV networks. UAV networks, if realized, offer a significant edge over conventional wireless communication networks, they can be easily re-configured and re-arranged to handle varying traffic, can provide critical communication facilities in disaster hit regions etc. In this work, we explore the scenario where UAV air-to-ground communications between a low altitude platform such as a UAV flying happens over an open ground setting. An integral component of the above is to come up with a wireless channel model that depends more on physics rather than the empirical studies. Thus, this work develops a physics based wireless channel model for UAV air-ground link and validates the said model. This, to the best of the author’s knowledge has never been attempted before. The author then uses the validated model to look for rate-based optimization as a UAV flies right above a ground node in a straight line.