Air-to-Ground Channel Characterization for Low-Height UAVs in Realistic Network Deployments
Abstract
Due to the decrease in cost, size and weight, UAV are becoming more and more popular for general-purpose civil and commercial applications. Provision of communication services to UAV both for user data and control messaging by using off-the-shelf terrestrial cellular deployments introduces several technical challenges. In this paper, an approach to the air-to-ground channel characterization for low-height UAV based on an extensive measurement campaign is proposed, giving special attention to the comparison of the results when a typical directional antenna for network deployments is used and when a quasi-omnidirectional one is considered. Channel characteristics like path loss, shadow fading, root mean square delay and Doppler frequency spreads and the K-factor are statistically characterized for different suburban scenarios.