Based on the geometry and ray tracing (RT) theory, a millimeter wave (mmWave) channel model and parameter computation method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted air-to-ground (A2G) communications are proposed in this paper. In order to speed up the parameter calculation, a reconstruction process of scene database on the original digital map is developed. Moreover, the effects of reconstruction accuracy on the channel parameter and characteristic are analyzed by extensive simulations at 28 GHz under the campus scene. The simulation and analysis results show that the simplified database can save up to 50% time consumption. However, the difference of statistical properties is slight in the campus scenario.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found widespread commercial, civilian, and military applications. Wireless communication has always been one of the core technologies for UAV. However, the communication capacity is becoming a bottleneck for UAV to support more challenging application scenarios. The heavily-occupied sub-6 GHz frequency band is not sufficient to meet the ultra high-data-traffic requirements. The utilization of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands is a promising direction for UAV communications, where large antenna arrays can be packed in a small area on the UAV to pe…
This paper discusses the analysis of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based millimeter wave (mmWave) backhaul link, that is offered as a cost-effective and easy deploy the solution to connect a disaster or remote area to the nearest core network. We present the optimal design of a relay system based on fixed-wing UAV, taking into account the actual channel parameters such as the UAV vibrations, tracking error, real 3GPP antenna pattern, UAV's height, flight path, and the effect of physical obstacles. The performance of the considered system is evaluated in terms of outage probability…
Physical layer security (PLS) techniques can help to protect wireless networks from eavesdropper attacks. In this paper, we consider the authentication technique that uses fingerprint embedding to defend 5G cellular networks with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems from eavesdroppers and intruders. Since the millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks use narrow and directional beams, PLS can take further advantage of the 3D spatial dimension for improving the authentication of UAV users. Considering a multi-user mmWave cellular network, we propose a power allocation technique that jointly ta…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the emerging vital components of millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless systems. Accurate beam alignment is essential for efficient beam-based mmWave communications of UAVs with base stations (BSs). Conventional beam sweeping approaches often have large overhead due to the high mobility and autonomous operation of UAVs. Learning-based approaches greatly reduce the overhead by leveraging UAV data, like position to identify optimal beam directions. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for UAV-BS beam alignment using deep Q-Network…
In this study, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted heterogeneous network that is offered as a cost-effective and easy to deploy solution to solve the problem related to transferring traffic of distributed small cells to the core network. For any given distribution of small cell base stations (SBSs), we first characterize an accurate millimeter wave (mmWave) channel model for SBS to networked flying platform (NFP) by taking into consideration real parameters such as UAV's vibrations, distribution of SBSs, position of UAVs in the sky, real three-dimensional (3D) antenna pattern…
Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are recently getting significant attention due to various practical use cases, e.g., surveillance, data gathering, purchase delivery, among other applications. Since UAVs are low power nodes, energy and spectral efficient communication is of paramount importance. To that end, multiple access (MA) schemes can play an important role in achieving high energy efficiency and spectral efficiency. In this work, we introduce rate-splitting MA (RSMA) and non-orthogonal MA (NOMA) schemes in a cellular-connected UAV network. In particular, we investigate…
Unmanned aerial vehicles~(UAVs) are envisioned to be an integral part of future 5G communication systems. The agile nature of UAVs for serving users at different locations can help to dynamically optimize coverage and quality-of-service (QoS) in future networks. %However, there is very limited literature available for mmWave communications using UAVs. In this work, we explore the small scale temporal and spatial characteristics of mmWave air-to-ground~(AG) line-of-sight~(LOS) propagation channels at $28$~GHz in different environmental scenarios: dense-urban, suburban, rural, and over sea using…
In this paper, millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless channel characteristics (Doppler spread and path loss modeling) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) assisted communication is analyzed and studied by emulating the real UAV motion using a robotic arm. The motion considers the actual turbulence caused by the wind gusts to the UAV in the atmosphere, which is statistically modeled by the widely used Dryden wind model. The frequency under consideration is 28 GHz in an anechoic chamber setting. A total of 11 distance points from 3.5 feet to 23.5 feet in increments of 2 feet were considered in this ex…
In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-based heterogeneous network is studied to solve the problem of transferring massive traffic of distributed small cells to the core network. First, a detailed three-dimensional (3D) model of the downlink channel is characterized by taking into account the real antenna pattern, UAVs' vibrations, random distribution of small cell base stations (SBSs), and the position of UAVs in 3D space. Then, a rigorous analysis of interference is performed for two types pf interference: intra-cell interference and inter-cell interference. The interference analys…
In this paper, we jointly consider the downlink simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and uplink information transmission in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks, in which the user equipment (UE) locations are modeled using Poisson cluster processes (e.g., Thomas cluster processes or Matérn cluster processes). Distinguishing features of mmWave communications, such as different path loss models for line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) links and directional transmissions are taken into account. In the downlink phase, the assoc…
We propose a fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-based millimeter wave (mmWave) backhaul links, that is offered as a cost effective and easy to deploy solution, to connect a disaster or remote area to the nearest core network. First, we fully characterize the single relay fixed-wing UAV-based communication system by taking into account the effects of realistic physical parameters, such as the UAV's circular path, critical points of the flight path, heights and positions of obstacles, flight altitude, tracking error, the severity of UAV's vibrations, the real 3D antenna pattern, mmWave at…
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless systems has been recently proposed to provide high data rate aerial links for next generation wireless networks. However, establishing UAV-based mmWave links is quite challenging due to the random fluctuations of hovering UAVs which can induce antenna gain mismatch between transmitter and receiver. To assess the benefit of UAV-based mmWave links, in this paper, tractable, closed-form statistical channel models are derived for three UAV communication scenarios: (i) a direct UAV-to-UAV link, (ii) an aerial r…
Communication and video capture from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant potential for assisting first responders in remote public safety settings. In such uses, millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless links can provide high throughput and low latency connectivity between the UAV and a remote command center. However, maintaining reliable aerial communication in the mmWave bands is challenging due to the need to support high speed beam tracking and overcome blockage. This paper provides a simulation study aimed at assessing the feasibility of public safety UAV connectivity through a 5G …
In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, channel state information (CSI) feedback is critical for the selection of modulation schemes, resource management, beamforming, etc. However, traditional CSI feedback methods lead to significant feedback overhead and energy consumption of the UAV transmitter, therefore shortening the system operation time. To tackle these issues, inspired by superimposed feedback and integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), a line of sight (LoS) sensing-based superimposed CSI feedback scheme is proposed. Specifically, on the UAV t…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks can provide a resilient communication infrastructure to enhance terrestrial networks in case of traffic spikes or disaster scenarios. However, to be able to do so, they need to be based on high-bandwidth wireless technologies for both radio access and backhaul. With this respect, the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum represents an enticing solution, since it provides large chunks of untapped spectrum that can enable ultra-high data-rates for aerial platforms. Aerial mmWave channels, however, experience characteristics that are significantly different from…
The use of Millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum in cellular communications has recently attracted growing interest to support the expected massive increase in traffic demands. However, the high path-loss at mmWave frequencies poses severe challenges. In this paper, we analyze the potential coverage gains of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as hovering relays, in integrated access and backhaul (IAB) mmWave cellular scenarios. Specifically, we utilize the WinProp software package, which employs ray tracing methodology, to study the propagation characteristics of outdoor mmWave channels at 30 …
Recent developments in robotics and communication technologies are paving the way towards the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide ubiquitous connectivity in public safety scenarios or in remote areas. The millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum, in particular, has gained momentum since the huge amount of free spectrum available at such frequencies can yield very high data rates. In the UAV context, however, mmWave operations may incur severe signal attenuation and sensitivity to blockage, especially considering the very long transmission distances involved. In this paper, we present a …
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed for numerous public and civil applications, such as goods delivery, medicine, surveillance, and telecommunications. For the latter, UAVs with onboard communication equipment may help temporarily offload traffic onto the neighboring cells in fifth-generation networks and beyond (5G+). In this paper, we propose and evaluate the use of UAVs traveling over the area of interest to relieve congestion in 5G+ systems under spontaneous traffic fluctuations. To this end, we assess two inherently different offloading schemes, named routed and cont…
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the terrestrial cellular networks is envisioned as one key technology for next-generation wireless communications. In this work, we consider the physical layer security of the communications links in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum which are maintained by UAVs functioning as base stations (BS). In particular, we propose a new precoding strategy which incorporates the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper (Eve) compromising link security. We show that our proposed precoder strategy eliminates any need for artificial noi…
Jittering effects significantly degrade the performance of UAV millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. To investigate the impacts of UAV jitter on mmWave communications, we firstly model UAV mmWave channel based on the geometric relationship between element antennas of the uniform planar arrays (UPAs). Then, we extract the relationship between (I) UAV attitude angles & position coordinates and (II) angle of arrival (AoA) & angle of departure (AoD) of mmWave channel, and we also derive the distribution of AoA/AoD at UAV side from the random fluctuations of UAV attitude angles, i.e., UAV jitter…
To meet increasing data demands, service providers are considering the use of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for delivering connectivity as aerial base stations (BSs). UAVs are especially important to provide connectivity in case of disasters and accidents which may cripple completely the existing terrestrial networks. However, in order to maintain the communication of UAVs with the core network, it is essential to provide them with wireless backhaul connection to terrestrial BSs. In this work, we use stochastic geometry to study the impact of millimeter-wave (mmWave) backhauling of UAVs in a…
Ground-to-air (GA) communication using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained popularity in recent years and is expected to be part of 5G networks and beyond. However, the GA links are susceptible to frequent blockages at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies. During a link blockage, the channel information cannot be obtained reliably. In this work, we provide a novel method of channel prediction during the GA link blockage at 28 GHz. In our approach, the multipath components (MPCs) along a UAV flight trajectory are arranged into independent path bins based on the minimum Euclidean distance…
In this paper, we explore the feasibility of utilizing a mmWave radar sensor installed on a UAV to reconstruct the 3D shapes of multiple objects in a space. The UAV hovers at various locations in the space, and its onboard radar senor collects raw radar data via scanning the space with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operation. The radar data is sent to a deep neural network model, which outputs the point cloud reconstruction of the multiple objects in the space. We evaluate two different models. Model 1 is our recently proposed 3DRIMR/R2P model, and Model 2 is formed by adding a segmentation s…
Performance Analysis of Digital Beamforming mmWave MIMO with Low-Resolution DACs/ADCs
TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；Christian Doppler Laboratory for Digital Twin assisted AI for sustainable Radio Access Networks（可持续无线接入网数字孪生辅助AI克劳迪普勒实验室）；Lund University（隆德大学）
In this paper, a full-duplex unmanned aerial vehicle (FD-UAV) relay is employed to increase the communication capacity of millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks. Large antenna arrays are equipped at the source node (SN), destination node (DN), and FD-UAV relay to overcome the high path loss of mmWave channels and to help mitigate the self-interference at the FD-UAV relay. Specifically, we formulate a problem for maximization of the achievable rate from the SN to the DN, where the UAV position, analog beamforming, and power control are jointly optimized. Since the problem is highly non-convex and in…
5G enabled maritime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication is one of the important applications of 5G wireless network which requires minimum latency and higher reliability to support mission-critical applications. Therefore, lossless reliable communication with a high data rate is the key requirement in modern wireless communication systems. These all factors highly depend upon channel conditions. In this work, a channel model is proposed for air-to-surface link exploiting millimeter wave (mmWave) for 5G enabled maritime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication. Firstly, we will prese…
Wireless communication between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the ground base station (BS) is susceptible to adversarial jamming. In such situations, it is important for the UAV to indicate a new channel to the BS. This paper describes a method of creating spatial codes that map the chosen channel to the motion and location of the UAVs in space, wherein the latter physically traverses the space from a given so called "constellation point'' to another. These points create patterns in the sky, analogous to modulation constellations in classical wireless communications, and are detected at …
GPS-Aided Deep Learning for Beam Prediction and Tracking in UAV mmWave Communication
Department of Intelligent Mechatronics Engineering, and Department of Convergence Engineering for Intelligent Drone, Sejong University（智能机电工程系，智能无人机融合工程系，世宗大学）
Millimeter-wave (mmWave), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), are expected to play a crucial role for 5G and beyond cellular and next-generation wireless local area network (WLAN) communications. Moreover, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also considered as an important component of next-generation networks. In this paper, we propose and present a mmWave distributed phased-arrays (DPA) architecture and proof-of-concept (PoC) designs for user equipment (UE) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which will be used in 5G/Beyond 5G wireless communication networks. Through enabling a mu…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) hybrid analog-digital beamforming is a promising approach to satisfy the low-latency constraint in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) systems, which serve as network infrastructure for flexible deployment. However, in highly dynamic multi-UAV environments, analog beam tracking becomes a critical challenge. The overhead of additional pilot transmission at the price of spectral efficiency is shown necessary to achieve high resilience in operation. An efficient method to deal with high dynamics of UAVs applies machine learning, particularly Q-learning, to analog bea…
On-demand deployments of millimeter-wave (mmWave) access points (APs) carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are considered today as a potential solution to enhance the performance of 5G+ networks. The battery lifetime of modern UAVs, though, limits the flight times in such systems. In this letter, we evaluate a feasible deployment alternative for temporary capacity boost in the areas with highly fluctuating user demands. The approach is to land UAV-based mmWave APs on the nearby buildings instead of hovering over the area. Within the developed mathematical framework, we compare the system…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided millimeter wave (mmWave) technologies have a promising prospect in the future communication networks. By considering the factors of three-dimensional (3D) scattering space, 3D trajectory, and 3D antenna array, a non-stationary channel model for UAV-to-vehicle (U2V) mmWave communications is proposed. The computation and generation methods of channel parameters including interpath and intra-path are analyzed in detail. The inter-path parameters are calculated in a deterministic way, while the parameters of intra-path rays are generated in a stochastic way. The…
In future drone applications fast moving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will need to be connected via a high throughput ultra reliable wireless link. MmWave communication is assumed to be a promising technology for UAV communication, as the narrow beams cause little interference to and from the ground. A challenge for such networks is the beamforming requirement, and the fact that frequent handovers are required as the cells are small. In the UAV communication research community, mobility and especially handovers are often neglected, however when considering beamforming, antenna array sizes s…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) millimeter wave (mmWave) technologies can provide flexible link and high data rate for future communication networks. By considering the new features of three-dimensional (3D) scattering space, 3D velocity, 3D antenna array, and especially 3D rotations, a machine learning (ML) integrated UAV-to-Vehicle (U2V) mmWave channel model is proposed. Meanwhile, a ML-based network for channel parameter calculation and generation is developed. The deterministic parameters are calculated based on the simplified geometry information, while the random ones are generated by the …
Efficient mitigation of power amplifier (PA) nonlinear distortion in multi-user hybrid precoding based broadband mmWave systems is an open research problem. In this article, we first carry out detailed signal and distortion modeling in broadband multi-user hybrid MIMO systems, with a bank of nonlinear PAs in each subarray, while also take the inevitable crosstalk between the antenna/PA branches into account. Building on the derived models, we then propose an efficient closed-loop (CL) digital predistortion (DPD) solution that requires only a single-input DPD unit per transmit chain or subarray…
Recently, full duplex (FD) has been studied in 5G LTE millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular communications for New Radio in 3GPP releases 15-17. FD allows bidirectional transmission over the same resources and has the potential to reduce latency and double spectral efficiency. Self-interference (SI) is the primary drawback. SI can be several orders of magnitude greater than the received signal power, saturate the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and degrade communication performance severely. Massive mmWave antenna arrays may provide enough degrees of freedom for spatial multiplexing and SI sup…
We consider a wideband integrated access and backhaul system operating in full-duplex mode between the New Radio gNB donor and single user equipment. Due to high power consumption in millimeter wave systems, we use low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in the receivers. Our contributions include (1) hybrid beamformer to maximize sum spectral efficiency of the access and backhaul links by canceling self-interference and maximizing received power; (2) all-digital beamformer and upper bound on sum spectral efficiency; and (3) simulations to compare full vs. half duplex, finite vs. in…
We design and build SKYHAUL, the first large-scale, autonomous, self-organizing network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are connected using a mmWave wireless mesh backhaul. While the use of a mmWave backhaul paves the way for a new class of bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive cooperative applications (e.g., LTE coverage during disasters, surveillance during rescue in challenging terrains), the network of UAVs allows these applications to be executed at operating ranges that are far beyond the line-of-sight distances that limit individual UAVs today. To realize the challenging vision…
Future millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, 5G cellular or WiFi, must rely on highly directional links to overcome severe pathloss in these frequency bands. Establishing such links requires the mutual discovery of the transmitter and the receiver %in the angular domain potentially leading to a large latency and high energy consumption. In this work, we show that both the discovery latency and energy consumption can be significantly reduced by using fully digital front-ends. In fact, we establish that by reducing the resolution of the fully-digital front-ends we can achieve lower energy consumptio…
Large-scale deployment of connected vehicles with cooperative sensing and maneuvering technologies increases the demand for vehicle-to-everything communication (V2X) band in 5.9 GHz. Besides the V2X spectrum, the under-utilized millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands at 24 and 77 GHz can be leveraged to supplement V2X communication and support high data rates for emerging broadband applications. For this purpose, joint radar-communication (JRC) systems have been proposed in the literature to perform both functions using the same waveform and hardware. In this work, we present a software-defined multipl…
This paper investigates the covert communication in an air-to-ground (A2G) system, where a UAV (Alice) can adopt the omnidirectional microwave (OM) or directional mmWave (DM) transmission mode to transmit covert data to a ground user (Bob) while suffering from the detection of an adversary (Willie). For both the OM and DM modes, we first conduct theoretical analysis to reveal the inherent relationship between the transmit rate/transmit power and basic covert performance metrics in terms of detection error probability (DEP), effective covert rate (ECR), and covert Shannon capacity (CSC). To fac…
Low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) simplify the design of millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) basestations, but increase vulnerability to jamming attacks. As a remedy, we propose HERMIT (short for Hybrid jammER MITigation), a method that combines a hardware-friendly adaptive analog transform with a corresponding digital equalizer: The analog transform removes most of the jammer's energy prior to data conversion; the digital equalizer suppresses jammer residues while detecting the legitimate transmit data. We provide theoretical r…
Configuring hybrid precoders and combiners is a major challenge to deploy practical mmWave communication systems. Prior work addresses the problem of designing hybrid precoders and combiner, yet focusing on finding solutions under a total transmit power constraint. The design of hybrid precoders and combiners in practical system, is constrained, however, by a per antenna transmit power, since each antenna element in the array is connected to a power amplifier (PA) that has to operate within its linear region. In this paper, we focus on the problem of hybrid precoding and combining with per-ant…
Receivers with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are promising for high bandwidth millimeter wave (mmWave) systems as they consume less power than their full resolution counterparts. The extreme quantization in one-bit receivers and the use of large antenna arrays at mmWave make channel estimation challenging. In this paper, we develop channel estimation algorithms that exploit the low-rank property of mmWave channels. We also propose a novel training solution that results in a low complexity implementation of our algorithms. Simulation results indicate that the proposed methods achi…
