Experimental evaluation of beamforming on UAVs in cellular systems

The usage of beamforming in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has the potential of significantly improving the air-to-ground link quality. This paper presents the outcome of experimental trial of such a UAV-based beamforming system over live cellular networks. A testbed with directional antennas has been built for the experiments. It is shown that beamforming can extend the signal coverage due to antenna gain, as well as spatially reduce interference leading to higher signal quality. Moreover, it has a positive impact on the mobility performance of a flying UAV by reducing handover occurrences. It is also discussed, in which situations beamforming should translate into the uplink throughput gain.