A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

By Wahab Ali Gulzar Khawaja, Ismail Güvenç, David W. Matolak, Uwe-Carsten Fiebig, Nicolas Schneckenburger. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2018

718 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, wide availability, and relative ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail, relative to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71f37969f1a8393ad47977d1a2d810f181acab44

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Citations in the corpus

UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends (2019, unknown): “[24] solely focused on the air-to-ground”
A Tutorial on UAVs for Wireless Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems (2018, background): “Khawaja [55] provided a comprehensive survey on A2G propagation while describing large-scale and small-scale fading models.”
A Vision and Framework for the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) Networks of the Future (2020, background): “numerous studies for modeling the channels of lower altitude platforms, such as [115].”
Joint Maneuver and Beamforming Design for UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, result): “This model is consistent with various measurement results [21], [22], and is widely adopted in previous works (e.”
3D Trajectory Optimization in Rician Fading for UAV-Enabled Data Harvesting (2019, background): “As reported in practical experiments, the UAV at a sufficiently high altitude is likely to establish LoS links with the ground SNs and also experiences smallscale fading due to rich scattering [34].”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “, [3], [26]–[29]) or only briefly mentioned (e.”
UAV Trajectory Planning for Data Collection from Time-Constrained IoT Devices (2020, background): “The most widely A2G model is proposed in [8]; we refer the interested reader to [9] where different propagation models are investigated based on channel measurements.”
6G Wireless Channel Measurements and Models: Trends and Challenges (2020, background): “The UAV channel shows some unique channel characteristics, such as 3D deployment, high mobility, spatial and temporal nonstationarity, and airframe shadowing [8], [9].”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, unknown): “The authors of [5] provide a comprehensive survey on available Air-to-Ground channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communications scenarios.”
A Comprehensive Survey on UAV Communication Channel Modeling (2019, background): “[28] recently conducted a survey on the A2G channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models.”
6G Wireless Systems: Vision, Requirements, Challenges, Insights, and Opportunities (2020, background): “There are a number of recent survey papers for UAV operation below 6 GHz at low altitudes (see [165] and [166]).”
Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2020, background): “…the network performance requires to account various key parameters and physical constraints including ﬂight constraints, UAVs energy consumption and their dynamics, and channel ﬂuctu-ation because of UAVs’ mobility, where most of them vary with time and accurate modeling is challenging [46], [47].”
Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “In particular, several magazine [12,13,20]–[23] and survey [11,24]– [34] papers on wireless communications and networks with UAVs have appeared.”
Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey (2018, methodology): “According to [27], most characteristics in space-air propagation channel using L-band are similar to those in space-ground channel, and the air-ground communications with UAVs have new characteristics due to arbitrary mobility patterns and diverse types of communication applications [35].”