Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have stroke great interested both by the academic community and the industrial community due to their diverse military applications and civilian applications. Furthermore, UAVs are also envisioned to be part of future airspace traffic. The application functions delivery relies on information exchange among UAVs as well as between UAVs and ground stations (GSs), which further closely depends on aeronautical channels. However, there is a paucity of comprehensive surveys on aeronautical channel modeling in line with the specific aeronautical characteristics and scenarios. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on reviewing the air-to-ground (A2G), ground-to-ground (G2G), and air-to-air (A2A) channel measurements and modeling for UAV communications and aeronautical communications under various scenarios. We also provide the design guideline for managing the link budget of UAV communications taking account of link losses and channel fading effects. Moreover, we also analyze the receive/transmit diversity gain and spatial multiplexing gain achieved by multiple-antenna-aided UAV communications. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenge and open issues for the future development of UAV communication channel modeling.
Highlights
Benefiting from the technical advances in artificial intelligence, computer and sensor technology, the world has seen the high profile of advanced military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as Predator, and Global hawk [1]
The use of UAVs and other aerial devices for relay links is an emerging technology and requires the channel to be characterized for establishing communication links, which can be broadly classified into two aspects namely, air-to-ground (A2G) communications and air-to-air (A2A) communications
We emphasize G2G and A2A channels in addition to conventional A2G channels [28]. we provide the overview of ducting, aircraft shadowing and MIMO channels in UAV communications
Summary
Benefiting from the technical advances in artificial intelligence, computer and sensor technology, the world has seen the high profile of advanced military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as Predator, and Global hawk [1]. UAV communication channel measurements have diverse aircraft sizes, which ensure their flight height reach down to tens of meters for mini-UAV, or up to thousands of meters for the UAV taking off from an airport and flying like an airplane. The former one can operate with forced turning maneuvering, whereas the later one can work at severe environments resulting in channels similar to aeronautical channel. We will review the UAV and aeronautical communication channel modeling studies.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
