A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, ease of availability, and ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail when compared to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios

ns-3 Implementation of the 3GPP MIMO Channel Model for Frequency Spectrum above 6 GHz

Communications at mmWave frequencies will be a key enabler of the next generation of cellular networks, due to the multi-Gbps rate that can be achieved. However, there are still several problems that must be solved before this technology can be widely adopted, primarily associated with the interplay between the variability of mmWave links and the complexity of mobile networks. An end-to-end network simulator represents a great tool to assess the performance of any proposed solution to meet the stringent 5G requirements. Given the criticality of channel propagation characteristics at higher frequencies, we present our implementation of the 3GPP channel model for the 6-100 GHz band for the ns-3 end-to-end 5G mmWave module, and detail its associated MIMO beamforming architecture

Delay Constrained Throughput Analysis of a Correlated MIMO Wireless Channel

The maximum traffic arrival rate at the network for a given delay guarantee (delay constrained throughput) has been well studied for wired channels. However, few results are available for wireless channels, especially when multiple antennas are employed at the transmitter and receiver. In this work, we analyze the network delay constrained throughput of a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless channel with time-varying spatial correlation. The MIMO channel is modeled via its virtual representation, where the individual spatial paths between the antenna pairs are Gilbert-Elliot channels. The whole system is then described by a K-State Markov chain, where K depends upon the degree of freedom (DOF) of the channel. We prove that the DOF based modeling is indeed accurate. Furthermore, we study the impact of the delay requirements at the network layer, violation probability and the number of antennas on the throughput under different fading speeds and signal strength.Comment: Submitted to ICCCN 2011, 8 pages, 5 figure