1 research outputs found
Analytical Channel Models for Millimeter Wave UAV Networks under Hovering Fluctuations
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and millimeter wave
(mmWave) wireless systems has been recently proposed to provide high data rate
aerial links for next generation wireless networks. However, establishing
UAV-based mmWave links is quite challenging due to the random fluctuations of
hovering UAVs which can induce antenna gain mismatch between transmitter and
receiver. To assess the benefit of UAV-based mmWave links, in this paper,
tractable, closed-form statistical channel models are derived for three UAV
communication scenarios: (i) a direct UAV-to-UAV link, (ii) an aerial relay
link in which source, relay, and destination are hovering UAVs, and (iii) a
relay link in which a hovering UAV connects a ground source to a ground
destination. The accuracy of the derived analytical expressions is corroborated
by performing Monte-Carlo simulations. Numerical results are then used to study
the effect of antenna directivity gain under different channel conditions for
establishing reliable UAV-based mmWave links in terms of achieving minimum
outage probability. It is shown that the performance of such links is largely
dependent on the random fluctuations of hovering UAVs. Moreover, higher antenna
directivity gains achieve better performance at low SNR regime. Nevertheless,
at the high SNR regime, lower antenna directivity gains result in a more
reliable communication link. The developed results can therefore be applied as
a benchmark for finding the optimal antenna directivity gain of UAVs under the
different levels of instability without resorting to time-consuming
simulations