Time Varying Channel Tracking for Multi-UAV Wideband Communications with Beam Squint

TL;DR

This paper investigates UAV communication channels affected by Doppler and beam squint effects, proposing a gridless compressed sensing method for efficient channel tracking that reduces training overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel GCS-based channel tracking approach accounting for Doppler and beam squint effects, enabling efficient uplink and downlink channel estimation with minimal pilot symbols.

Findings

The proposed method accurately estimates channel parameters under Doppler and beam squint effects.

Downlink channel can be derived from a single pilot symbol using reciprocity.

Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an appealing solution for a wide range of commercial and civilian applications because of its high mobility and flexible deployment. Due to the continuous UAV navigation, the channel between UAV and base station (BS) is subject to the Doppler effect. Meanwhile, when the BS is equipped with massive number of antennas, the non-negligible propagation delay across the array aperture would cause beam squint effect. In this paper, we first investigate the channel of UAV communications under both Doppler shift effect and beam squint effect. Then, we design a gridless compressed sensing (GCS) based channel tracking method, where the high dimension uplink channel can be derived by estimating a few physical parameters such as the direction of arrival (DOA), Doppler shift, and the complex gain information. Besides, with the Doppler shift reciprocity and angular reciprocity, the downlink channel can be derived by only one pilot symbol, which greatly decreases the downlink channel training overhead. Various simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.