Flight Sensor Data and Beamforming based Integrated UAV Tracking with Channel Estimation using Gaussian Process Regression

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated UAV tracking scheme combining flight sensor data and beamforming signals, utilizing Gaussian process regression to improve link reliability and reduce overhead in dynamic UAV scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel integrated UAV tracking method that combines flight sensor data with beamforming signals using GPR, enhancing link stability and reducing overhead.

Findings

Outperforms conventional beam tracking schemes in simulations.

Provides 3D beamforming gain and spectral efficiency metrics.

Reduces overhead in UAV position prediction and tracking.

Abstract

With explosively increasing demands for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, reliable link acquisition for serving UAVs is required. Considering the dynamic characteristics of UAV, it is hugely challenging to persist a reliable link without beam misalignment. In this paper, we propose a flight sensor data and beamforming signal based integrated UAV tracking scheme to deal with this problem. The proposed scheme provides a compatible integrated system considering the practical specification of the flight sensor data and the beamforming pilot signal. The UAV position tracking is comprised of two steps: 1) UAV position prediction by the flight sensor data and 2) position update with the beamforming signal using Gaussian process regression (GPR) method, which is a nonparametric machine learning. The flight sensor data can assist ground station (GS) or UAV nodes in designing the precoding and the receive beamforming matrix with drastically reduced overheads. The beamforming signal can accomplish high beamforming gain to be maintained even when the flight sensor data is absent. Therefore, the proposed scheme can support the moving target continuously by utilizing these two signals. The simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed scheme outperforms other conventional beam tracking schemes. We also derive 3-dimensional (3D) beamforming gain and spectral efficiency (SE) from the mean absolute error (MAE) of the angular value estimation, which can be used as beamforming performance metrics of the data transmission link in advance.