Robust and Low Complexity Beam Tracking With Monopulse Signal for UAV Communications

UAV communications based on an antenna array entail a beam tracking issue for reliable link acquisition. Unlike conventional cellular communication, beam tracking in UAV communication addresses new issues such as mobility and abrupt channel disconnection from UAV's perturbation. To deal with these issues, we propose a beam tracking scheme based on extended Kalman filter (EKF) using a monopulse signal, which can provide (1) higher robustness by offering a reliable link in the estimated spatial direction and (2) lower complexity compared with the existing codebook based beamforming scheme. We point out the limitations of using a beamformed signal as a measurement model for a Kalman filter (KF) based scheme and instead utilize the monopulse signal as a more plausible model. For the performance evaluation, we derive the upper bound of the mean square error for spatial angle estimation of the UAV and confirm that our proposed scheme is stable with a certain bounded error. We also show from our simulations that our proposed scheme can efficiently track UAV and detect beam disconnection every time frame using a beamformed signal.

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