Impact of UAV Jittering on the Air-to-Ground Wireless Channel
This letter studies the impact of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jittering on the coherence time of the wireless channel between UAVs and a ground user equipment (UE), using a Rician multi-path channel model. We consider two different scenarios for the number of UAVs: (i) single UAV scenario (SUS), and (ii) multiple UAV scenario (MUS). For each scenario, we model the UAV jittering by two random processes, i.e., the Wiener and sinusoidal processes, and characterize the channel autocorrelation function (ACF) which is then used to derive the coherence time of the channel. For the MUS, we further show that the UAV-UE channels for different UAVs are uncorrelated from each other. A key observation in this letter is that even for a small UAV jittering, the coherence time of the channel may degrade quickly, which may make it difficult to track the channel and establish a reliable communication link.
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