Empirical Low-Altitude Air-to-Ground Spatial Channel Characterization for Cellular Networks Connectivity

• Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently attracted a surge of interest in both academia and industry. Understanding the air-to-ground (A2G) propagation channels is essential to enable reliable and/or high-throughput communications for UAVs and protect the ground user equipments (UEs). In this contribution, a recently conducted measurement campaign for the A2G channels is introduced. A uniform circular array (UCA) with 16 antenna elements was employed to collect the downlink signals of two different Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, at the heights of 0-40m in three different, namely rural, urban and industrial scenarios. The channel impulse responses (CIRs) have been extracted from the received data, and the spatial, including angular, parameters of the multipath components in individual channels were estimated according to a high-resolution-parameter-estimation (HRPE) principle. Based on the HRPE results, clusters of multipath components were further identified. Finally, comprehensive spatial channel characteristics were investigated in the composite and cluster levels at different heights in the three scenarios.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

air-to-ground

and clusters

angular characteristics

cellular networks

spatial channels

UAV

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)