Experimental evaluation of beamforming on UAVs in cellular systems

Abstract

The usage of beamforming in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has the potential of significantly improving the air-to-ground link quality. This paper presents the outcome of experimental trial of such a UAV-based beamforming system over live cellular networks. A testbed with directional antennas has been built for the experiments. It is shown that beamforming can extend the signal coverage due to antenna gain, as well as spatially reduce interference leading to higher signal quality. Moreover, it has a positive impact on the mobility performance of a flying UAV by reducing handover occurrences. It is also discussed, in which situations beamforming should translate into the uplink throughput gain.

A Survey of Prototype and Experiment for UAV Communications

“…For the mitigation of downlink interference from cochannel base stations to UAVs, directional antenna and MIMO beamforming can be similarly applied. Recently, various techniques have been explored in measurement campaigns to mitigate the interference induced by cellular-connected UAV, e.g., power control [89], directional antenna [80,90], multi-antennas [44,81,89,91], and joint cooperative multi-point transmission [86,89], etc.…”

“…Cellular-connected UAVs have a great potential for search and rescue, inspection, entertainment and media, as well as traffic monitoring, etc., where UAVs are integrated as new aerial users that access the cellular network from the sky [2,6,19,80,81]. Thanks to the almost worldwide availability of terrestrial cellular networks, it is possible for the UAV operators or pilots to control the UAV remotely with beyond LoS links.…”