This experimental scenario includes communication between a fixed tower and a drone, as illustrated in the adjacent figure, where both ends carry a PAW. We will initially consider limited mobility for the drone, e.g., the drone may be tethered (power and fiber) to make it available for experimentation that may last several hours or longer. In AERPAW, we are presently using a drone tether from NTP Drone. We consider the limited mobility of the drone, e.g., the experimenter may be primarily interested in channel propagation measurements at different drone altitudes. The horizontal location of the drone may also be changed semi-statically by moving the drone tether to different locations, and short-distance horizontal movements can be possible to the extent that the drone tether allows.
Experiments in this mode can involve those between two or more portable SDRs, as well as the SDRs and other equipment (e.g. RF sensors, base stations, IoT APs). Some example experiments include evaluation of the RF coverage at different drone heights/locations and for different antenna orientations and wideband channel sounding experiments.
RF Coverage Measurement
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Wideband Channel Sounding
| [1] D. Becker, U. Fiebig, and L. Schalk, “Wideband channel measurements and first findings for low altitude drone-to-drone links in an urban scenario,” in 2020 14th European Conf. on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2020, pp. 1–5. |
| [2] W. Khwaja, I. Guvenc, and D. W. Matolak, “UWB channel sounding and modeling for UAV air-to-ground propagation channels,” in Proc. IEEE GLOBECOM, Washington, DC, Dec. 2016 |