Abstract
The wireless relay network utilizing multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has now been widely studied. Since the radio propagation in the UAV network is close to free space environment, co-channel interference to other UAVs and the ground station (GS) becomes a serious problem. Designing a directional and multiband antenna is quite effective against this issue; multiple metamaterial reflectors are our key solution. Meanwhile, the flight time of the UAV imposes a limitation on the payload weight including communication equipment. This paper proposes a directional antenna employing a lightweight metamaterial reflector to reduce the antenna weight. It is realized by the woodpile structure which consists of layers of dielectric rods with a stacking sequence. Making the hole in the center of each dielectric rod can reduce the woodpile reflector's weight with maintaining the antenna radiation performance. The electromagnetic field simulation clarified the reflection characteristics by making the hole. Both simulative and experimental evaluations clarified that the proposed antenna has almost the same radiation characteristics as the conventional one while reducing its weight by 25%, which saves the power consumption by 12.5%.
Highlights
Wireless communication systems must offer higher bit rates because smartphones and tablet terminals are becoming increasingly popular
The advantage of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) networks should be fully exploited with a wire-free structure and the key issue is to reduce the weight of the payload to be mounted in order to extend the flight time
This paper proposed the directional antenna employing the lightweight woodpile reflector for the UAV-based relay network
Summary
Wireless communication systems must offer higher bit rates because smartphones and tablet terminals are becoming increasingly popular. The advantage of the UAV networks should be fully exploited with a wire-free structure and the key issue is to reduce the weight of the payload to be mounted in order to extend the flight time. Our proposed reflector configuration using woodpile metamaterial can be applied to the conception of that work Such conventional metal reflector has fixed antenna directivity. To design the different directivity for each frequency band, we previously proposed the multiband directional antenna structure with multiband radiators and reflectors which consist of a metamaterial [12], [13]. The UAV-based relay network consists of two links: UAV-to-UAV and UAV-to-GS links These links usually use different frequency bands in order to avoid interference. Since the UAV-based network organizes the topology map, the GS transmits the geometrical information to other GSs via this network
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