Air-to-Ground Wireless Links for High-Speed UAVs

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more popular and the demand for wireless links for UAVs is increasing, it is crucial to develop air-to-ground (A2G) wireless links for high-speed UAVs. Suffering from the high mobility and limitation of transmission power of UAVs, A2G wireless links become unstable to provide high quality communication services. In this paper, we design robust A2G wireless links for high speed UAVs, where conjunct power control is developed together with switched beamforming to maximize the power efficiency and minimize the fluctuation of A2G wireless links of millimeter wave (mmWave) signal transmission. We first present channel models for A2G wireless links of high-speed UAVs, which can be virtually seen as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. To maximize the power efficiency, a conjunct power control problem is formulated to allocate powers for wireless links between antenna arrays on UAVs and access points (APs). For switched beamforming, beamformers are designed to provide a certain time-invariant signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) to minimize the SINR fluctuation of A2G wireless links. From theoretical analysis and numerical results, it is shown that the proposed architecture is able to provide robust and high quality A2G wireless links for high-speed UAV communication systems.

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