# Cellular UAV-to-UAV Communications

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes UAV-to-UAV communications within cellular networks, evaluating their impact on ground user performance and demonstrating how UAV height and power control influence link quality and interference.

## Contribution

It provides an analytical framework incorporating realistic models to assess U2U communication performance and interference in cellular networks.

## Key findings

- U2U communications slightly impair GUE performance, mainly through sidelobe interference.
- UAV height increase degrades link quality due to more line-of-sight interferers.
- Adjusting UAV power control can balance U2U and GUE performance.

## Abstract

Reliable and direct communication between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could facilitate autonomous flight, collision avoidance, and cooperation in UAV swarms. In this paper, we consider UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communications underlaying a cellular network, where UAV transmit-receive pairs share the same spectrum with the uplink (UL) of cellular ground users (GUEs). We evaluate the performance of this setup through an analytical framework that embraces realistic height-dependent channel models, antenna patterns, and practical power control mechanisms. Our results demonstrate that, although the presence of U2U communications may worsen the performance of the GUEs, such effect is limited as base stations receive UAV interference through their antenna sidelobes. Moreover, we illustrate that the quality of all links degrades as the UAV height increases---due to a larger number of line-of-sight interferers---, and how the performance of the U2U links can be traded off against that of the GUEs by varying the UAV power control policy.