Statistical Channel Modeling for Low-Altitude UAVs in an Urban Tree-Covered Environment

This letter presents the measurements of dual-polarized multiple-input-multiple-output (DP-MIMO) channel between a flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and a ground terminal. The campaign is carried out in an urban area under with trees surrounding the receiver. The UAV-to-ground channel is statistically modeled by a novel proposed composite distribution that is realized from the combination of the Inverse Gaussian (IG) and Rayleigh processes, in view of characterizing the shadowing and multipath effects of the channel. It is shown that the suggested new mixed model exhibits a noticeable adaptability, fitting very well to the measured data and delivering errors below 5%, according to the Kullback–Leibler distance metric.