A Comprehensive Survey on UAV Communication Channel Modeling

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have stroke great interested both by the academic community and the industrial community due to their diverse military applications and civilian applications. Furthermore, UAVs are also envisioned to be part of future airspace traffic. The application functions delivery relies on information exchange among UAVs as well as between UAVs and ground stations (GSs), which further closely depends on aeronautical channels. However, there is a paucity of comprehensive surveys on aeronautical channel modeling in line with the specific aeronautical characteristics and scenarios. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on reviewing the air-to-ground (A2G), ground-to-ground (G2G), and air-to-air (A2A) channel measurements and modeling for UAV communications and aeronautical communications under various scenarios. We also provide the design guideline for managing the link budget of UAV communications taking account of link losses and channel fading effects. Moreover, we also analyze the receive/transmit diversity gain and spatial multiplexing gain achieved by multiple-antenna-aided UAV communications. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenge and open issues for the future development of UAV communication channel modeling.

Keywords

• UAV communication
• aeronautical communication
• channel characterization
• statistical channel
• air-to-ground
• cellular networks