Effects of Digital Map on the RT-based Channel Model for UAV mmWave Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a mmWave channel model for UAV air-to-ground communications based on ray tracing and digital maps, demonstrating a 50% reduction in computation time with minimal impact on accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a scene database reconstruction method to accelerate parameter calculation for UAV mmWave channel modeling.

Findings

Reconstruction reduces computation time by up to 50%.

Minimal difference in statistical properties with simplified database.

Effective for campus scene at 28 GHz.

Abstract

Based on the geometry and ray tracing (RT) theory, a millimeter wave (mmWave) channel model and parameter computation method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted air-to-ground (A2G) communications are proposed in this paper. In order to speed up the parameter calculation, a reconstruction process of scene database on the original digital map is developed. Moreover, the effects of reconstruction accuracy on the channel parameter and characteristic are analyzed by extensive simulations at 28 GHz under the campus scene. The simulation and analysis results show that the simplified database can save up to 50% time consumption. However, the difference of statistical properties is slight in the campus scenario.