Impact of UAV Wobbling on the Air-to-Ground Wireless Channel

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wobbling 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 UAV wobbling 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 paper is that even for small UAV wobbling, the coherence time of the channel may degrade quickly, which may make it difficult to track the channel and establish a reliable communication link.