A Double-Beam Soft Handover Scheme and Its Performance Analysis for mmWave UAV Communications in Windy Scenarios

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as users to access the cellular network over the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum form a promising solution to guarantee high data rate transmission. Due to the narrow beams in the mmWave systems and the high mobility of the UAVs, a key challenge of mmWave UAV communications is to design efficient and seamless handover schemes, especially in windy scenarios. In this paper, we first investigate the signaling interaction procedure of the hard handover strategy in 3GPP 5G new radio (NR) standard. For providing better connectivity and lower outage probability, a soft handover scheme named double-beam soft handover (DB-SH) is designed for the mmWave UAV system. Considering the dynamic wind effects, we formulate a random walk (RW) model for quantifying the angle offsets of the beams at the UAVs, as the orientations of the UAVs suffer from the fluctuations over time due to the dynamic wind load. Considering the RW model and the beam training, we further analyze the outage probabilities of the 3GPP 5G NR hard handover scheme and the DB-SH scheme for the mmWave UAV communication systems. Finally, our simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the presented theoretical analysis which provides insights for mmWave UAV system designs.