Full-Duplex Aerial Communication System for Multiple UAVs with Directional Antennas

TL;DR

This paper proposes a full-duplex aerial communication system for multiple UAVs using directional antennas to reduce interference and hardware complexity, enabling efficient UAV-ground communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that achieves full-duplex UAV communication with lower hardware complexity by leveraging UAV maneuverability and directional antennas to eliminate co-channel interference.

Findings

System design effectively reduces interference among UAVs.

Simulation results confirm the system's performance aligns with theoretical analysis.

The approach simplifies hardware requirements for UAV communication systems.

Abstract

UAV-based wireless systems, such as wireless relay and remote sensing, have attracted great attentions from academia and industry. To realize them, a high-performance wireless aerial communication system, which bridges UAVs and ground stations, is one of the key enablers. However, there are still issues hindering its development, such as the severe co-channel interference among UAVs, and the limited payload/battery-life of UAVs. To address the challenges, we propose an aerial communication system which enables system-level full-duplex communication of multiple UAVs with lower hardware complexities than ideal full-duplex communication systems. In the proposed system, each channel is re-assigned to the uplink and downlink of a pair of UAVs, and each UAV employ a pair of separated channels for its uplink and downlink. The co-channel interference between UAVs that reuse same channels is eliminated by exploiting advantages of UAVs' maneuverability and high-gain directional antennas equipped in UAVs and ground stations, so that dedicated cancellers are not necessary in the proposed system. The system design and performance analysis are given, and the simulation results well agree with the designs.