UAV Communications: Impact of Obstacles on Channel Characteristics

TL;DR

This paper explores how obstacles affect UAV-based wireless channels and proposes a simulation approach to optimize UAV placement for improved communication quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation-based method for characterizing air-to-ground channels considering obstacles for better UAV placement.

Findings

Obstacles significantly impact throughput and packet loss.

Optimal UAV positioning improves QoS metrics.

Simulation results validate the proposed placement approach.

Abstract

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been utilized as effective platforms for carrying Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) and cellular Base Stations (BSs), enabling low-cost, agile, and flexible wireless networks with high Quality of Service (QoS). The next generation of wireless communications will rely on increasingly higher frequencies, which are easily obstructed by obstacles. One of the most critical concepts yet to be fully addressed is positioning the UAV at optimal coordinates while accounting for obstacles. To ensure a line of sight (LoS) between UAVs and user equipment (UE), improve QoS, and establish reliable wireless links with maximum coverage, obstacles must be integrated into the proposed placement algorithms. This paper introduces a simulation-based measurement approach for characterizing an air-to-ground (AG) channel in a simple scenario. By considering obstacles, we present a novel perspective on channel characterization. The results, in terms of throughput, packet delivery, packet loss, and delay, are compared using the proposed positioning approach.