Channel characteristics of UAV to ground links over multipath urban environments

The use of UAVs for various applications is a rapidly growing research field nowadays. Knowledge of the wireless UAV-to-ground propagation channel is crucial for designing an efficient communication system and for evaluating its performance. In this contribution the channel characteristics of UAV-to-ground links over multipath urban environments are investigated. The complexity of modeling in such environments is due to the presence of multipath phenomena - reflections, diffraction and scattering from objects in space. Hence, ray tracing simulations were performed in order to estimate the received power, time varying channel impulse response, mean time of arrival and delay spread. Finally, this site-specific method allowed assessing which buildings in the receiver vicinity are involved in the physical process.