Channel Prediction for mmWave Ground-to-Air Propagation Under Blockage

Ground-to-air (GA) communication using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained popularity in recent years and is expected to be part of 5G networks and beyond. However, the GA links are susceptible to frequent blockages at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. During a link blockage, the channel information cannot be obtained reliably. In this letter, we provide a novel method of channel prediction during the GA link blockage at 28 GHz. In our approach, the multipath components (MPCs) along a UAV flight trajectory are arranged into independent path bins based on the minimum Euclidean distance among the channel parameters of the MPCs. After the arrangement, the channel parameters of the MPCs in individual path bins are forecasted during the blockage. An autoregressive model is used for forecasting. The results obtained from ray-tracing simulations indicate a close match between the actual and the predicted mmWave channel.