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Adaptive Link Optimization for 802.11 UAV Uplink Using a Reconfigurable Antenna
Conference proceeding

Adaptive Link Optimization for 802.11 UAV Uplink Using a Reconfigurable Antenna

Stephen Wolfe, Simon Begashaw, Yuqiao Liu and Kapil R Dandekar
MILCOM 2018 - 2018 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), v 2019-, pp 1-6
Oct 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MILCOM.2018.8599696

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost and flexible experimental testbed for aerial communication research along with an implementation and experimental evaluation of an aerial-to-ground 802.11g link with an adaptive beamsteering antenna system. The system consists of a software-defined radio (SDR) platform, and a pattern reconfigurable antenna mounted on a hexacopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). First, the system design aspects of the tesbed are described. The performance of the reconfigurable antenna is characterized through radiation pattern measurements while the antenna is mounted on the underbelly of the UAV. A low complexity reinforcement learning based adaptive antenna selection algorithm is implemented on the aerial SDR testing platform to enhance the link quality. We present SNR measurements obtained during various indoor and outdoor flight scenarios. The results show that utilizing a reconfigurable antenna and intelligent antenna selection strategy onboard a UAV provides a higher mean SNR compared to an omni-directional antenna in both line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) scenarios, and is more resilient to co-channel interference.

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9 citations in Scopus

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