Measuring Receiver Diversity on a Low-Altitude UAV in a Ground-to-Air Wireless Mesh Network

We consider the problem of mitigating a highly varying wireless channel between a ground node transmitting to a small, low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a wireless mesh network. One approach is to use multiple receiver nodes on the UAV that exploit the channel’s spatial/temporal diversity and that cooperate to improve overall packet reception. We present a series of measurement studies from a real-world testbed that characterize the wireless channel between a transmitter ground node and multiple receiver nodes on a UAV. We show that the correlation between receiver nodes is poor and that using four receiver nodes can boost packet delivery rates by some 25%.