Experiment of Multi-UAV Full-Duplex System Equipped with Directional Antennas

TL;DR

This paper presents a field-tested multi-UAV full-duplex communication system using directional antennas to effectively cancel co-channel interference, enhancing spectrum efficiency without complex self-interference cancellation hardware.

Contribution

The study introduces a prototype system demonstrating interference cancellation through directional antennas and UAV positioning, reducing hardware complexity in full-duplex UAV communications.

Findings

Effective interference cancellation confirmed in field experiments.

Significant performance improvements observed in uplink and downlink.

Channel power measurements validate interference management strategy.

Abstract

One of the key enablers for the realization of a variety of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based systems is the high-performance communication system linking many UAVs and ground station. We have proposed a spectrum-efficient full-duplex directional-antennas-equipped multi-UAV communication system with low hardware complexity to address the issues of low spectrum efficiency caused by co-channel interference in areal channels. In this paper, by using the prototype system including UAVs and ground station, field experiments are carried out to confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system's key feature, i.e., co-channel interference cancellation among UAVs by directional antennas and UAV relative position control, instead of energy-consuming dedicated self-interference cancellers on UAVs in traditional full-duplex systems. Both uplink and downlink performance are tested. Specially, in downlink experiment, channel power of interference between a pair of two UAVs is measured when UAVs are in different positional relationships. The experiment results agree well with the designs and confirm that the proposed system can greatly improve the system performance.