UAV Wireless Communications Performance in Urban Environments

As the adoption of UAVs grows steadily, more and more applications are being devised. In the scope of urban environments, initiatives like U-Space in Europe seek to standardize and regulate the different operations that can be undertaken by these aircraft. In order to facilitate these new applications, and UAV research in general, it is important that we have a correct understanding of communication with and/or between UAVs. However, we find that studies towards communication models are lacking, especially regarding studies in urban environments, where obstacles (e.g. tall buildings) are prone to interfere the communication. Hence, in this paper, we aim at better understanding the differences between already existing communication models w.r.t. (i) UAV-to-UAV communication, (ii) UAV-to-ground communication, and (iii) UAV-to-vehicle communication. To this end, we use an advanced co-simulation framework that accurately models both UAV mobility and the communication. Our results show that (i) different communication models provide similar results, (ii) UAV-to-UAV communication becomes feasible at a high altitude (e.g. 120 m), especially in the presence of tall buildings, and (iii) that communication towards the ground highly depends on whether line-of-sight communications are available. In case there is no line of sight, the performance is drastically impacted, and this is true independently of the altitude of the UAV.