A 3D Non-Stationary MIMO Channel Model for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Auxiliary UAV-to-Ground mmWave Communications

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications exploiting millimeter wave (mmWave) can satisfy the increasing data rate demands for future wireless networks owing to the line-of-sight (LoS) dominated transmission and flexibility. In reality, the LoS link can be easily and severely blocked due to poor propagation environments such as tall buildings or trees. To this end, we introduce a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which passively reflects signals with programmable reflection coefficients, between the transceivers to enhance the communication quality. Specifically, in this paper we generalize a three-dimensional (3D) non-stationary wideband end-to-end channel model for RIS auxiliary UAV-to-ground mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. By modeling the RIS as a virtual cluster, we study the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">power delivering capability</i> of RIS as well as the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">fading characteristic</i> of the proposed channel model. Important channel statistical properties are derived and thoroughly investigated, and the impact of RIS reflection phase configurations on these statistical properties is studied, which provides guidelines for the practical system design. The agreement between theoretical and simulated as well as measurement results validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel model.