3 research outputs found
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
Application-Driven Design of Aerial Communication Networks
Networks of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) equipped with various sensors are increasingly used for civil applications, such as monitoring, surveillance, and disaster management. In this article, we discuss the communication requirements raised by applications in MAV networks. We propose a novel system representation that can be used to specify different application demands. To this end, we extract key functionalities expected in an MAV network. We map these functionalities into building blocks to characterize the expected communication needs. Based on insights from own and related real-world experiments we discuss the capabilities of existing communication technologies and their limitations to realize the proposed building blocks. Our findings indicate that, while certain requirements of MAV applications are met with available technologies, further research and development is needed to address the scalability, heterogeneity, safety, quality of service, and security aspects of multi-MAV systems