Drone-to-Drone Propagation Characteristics in Urban Safety-Critical Scenarios

• Published in: 2022 IEEE Conference on Antenna Measurements and Applications (CAMA) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Becker, Dennis, Fiebig, Uwe-Carsten, Schalk, Lukas Marcel
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 14.12.2022
• Subjects: air-to-air; Antenna measurements; drone-to-drone communication; Physical layer; Position measurement; Power measurement; propagation; safety-critical scenarios; Stochastic processes; Surveillance; unmanned aerial vehicle; Urban areas
• ISSN: 2643-6795
• DOI: 10.1109/CAMA56352.2022.10002461

For the future Urban Air Mobility we expect a highly frequented urban air space with many autonomously flying unmanned aircraft, often called drones. In order to mitigate the risk of mid-air collisions in high dense drone scenarios, a robust and reliable information exchange between all airspace users based on direct Drone-to-Drone communication will be an essential part. But due to the high mobility of drones and the strong multipath propagation in urban environments, a communication system must be specifically designed for being able to cope with those challenging conditions. Therefore, we performed a channel sounding measurement campaign in order to investigate the specific Drone-to-Drone propagation characteristics in urban environments and identified stronger multipath components sources for different scenarios in previous work. In this work, we first analyze and present the propagation characteristics for a highly safety-critical scenario, in which the drones are on collision course with changing propagation conditions. Secondly, we use the findings to simulate and discuss the influence on a transmission system. Furthermore, we show when certain propagation effects can be beneficial for the communication in terms of collision avoidance.