Impacts of Flight Altitude and UAV Posture on the UAV-to-Ground Channel Gain

This paper proposes a general unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-ground (U2G) channel model. The proposed model is consistent with real scenarios by considering the impacts of flight altitude and UAV posture on channel gain. Machine learning and ray tracing (RT) techniques are employed to improve the generation method of altitude-dependent parameters, i.e., path loss (PL) and shadow fading (SF). In addition, posture-related fuselage shadowing coefficient (FSC) is introduced to modify the channel gain, and three-dimensional (3D) geometry modeling of the fuselage is conducted to calculate the FSC. Numerical simulation results show that the flight altitude and UAV posture have obvious effects on channel gain. The proposed model with modified channel gain can effectively describe the PL, SF, and received power under fuselage shadowing. The validity and advantage of the improved channel gain are verified by comparing the simulation results with the measured ones.