Beam Tracking for UAV Mounted SatCom on-the-Move With Massive Antenna Array

• Published in: IEEE journal on selected areas in communications Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 363 - 375
• Main Authors: Zhao, Jianwei, Gao, Feifei, Wu, Qihui, Jin, Shi, Wu, Yi, Jia, Weimin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.02.2018
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; beam tracking; electrical adjustment; hybrid; massive antenna array; mechanical adjustment; Mechanical sensors; SatCom on-the-move; Satellite antennas; Satellite broadcasting; Satellite navigation systems; Satellites; UAV
• ISSN: 0733-8716
• DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2018.2804239

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite communication has drawn dramatic attention for its potential to build the integrated space-air-ground network and the seamless wide-area coverage. A key challenge to UAV-satellite communication is its unstable beam pointing due to the UAV navigation, which is a typical SatCom on-the-move scenario. In this paper, we propose a blind beam tracking approach for Ka-band UAV-satellite communication system, where UAV is equipped with a hybrid large-scale antenna array. The effects of UAV navigation are firstly released through the mechanical adjustment, which could approximately point the beam towards the target satellite through beam stabilization and dynamic isolation. Specially, the attitude information for mechanical adjustment can be realtimely derived from data fusion of low-cost sensors. Then, the precision of beam pointing is blindly refined through electrically adjusting the weight of the massive antennas, where an array structure based simultaneous perturbation algorithm is designed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing ones.