Spectrum Sharing between Directional-Antenna- Equipped UAV System and Terrestrial Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a spectrum sharing strategy for UAV and terrestrial systems using directional antennas, optimizing UAV flight areas while minimizing interference, demonstrated through a 5.7GHz band case study.

Contribution

It introduces a spectrum sharing approach that predefines UAV flyable areas based on prior spectrum monitoring, reducing interference without dynamic sensing.

Findings

The proposed method enables UAV flight over the entire area.

Simulation shows effective interference minimization.

Strategy improves UAV operation efficiency in shared spectrum.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-based applications, such as surveillance systems and wireless relays, are attracting increasing attention from academia and industrial fields. The high-performance aerial communication system is one of the key enablers for them. However, due to the low attenuation of radio waves in the air-to-ground channels, the interference between aerial and terrestrial communication systems would significantly deteriorate their communication performance and greatly limit the potential UAV applications. To address the problem, in this paper, the spectrum sharing strategy between a multiple UAV communication system, in which both UAVs and ground station (GS) are equipped with directional antennas, and terrestrial systems is proposed. The GS position is selected and the flyable areas of the UAVs using certain spectrum resources are defined in advance using prior knowledge from spectrum monitoring on terrestrial communication systems to minimize interference and maximize the flyable areas of the UAVs instead of the low-efficient dynamic channel sensing and allocation for interference elimination. The simulations are conducted through a case study of the spectrum sharing between a multi-UAV video transmission system and the terrestrial wireless local area network (WLAN) system in the 5.7GHz band. The simulation results show that thanks to the proposed system the entire area can be enabled for UAV flight.