Performance evaluation of OFDM transmission in UAV wireless communication

The use of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in collaborative missions is an increasing research area for military planners. One of the important factors to ensure the collaboration among swarm UAVs is the reliable, high performance wireless communication links among UAVs. Because of its high frequency efficiency and high performance, OFDM based multi-carrier transmission technology has been considered one of the strong candidates for swarm UAV communications. However, UAV communication links are quite different from wireless LAN and wireless MAN environments where OFDM is currently used. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the BER performance of IEEE 802.11a compatible OFDM system in a UAV wireless communication channel where a large Doppler shift has been observed and where inter-carrier-interference (ICI) is much larger than those of wireless LAN and wireless MAN scenarios.