Due to the decrease in cost, size, and weight, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more and more popular for general-purpose civil and commercial applications. Provision of communication services to… Click to show full abstract
Due to the decrease in cost, size, and weight, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more and more popular for general-purpose civil and commercial applications. Provision of communication services to UAVs both for user data and control messaging by using off-the-shelf terrestrial cellular deployments introduces several technical challenges. In this article, an approach to the air-to-ground channel characterization for low-height UAVs based on an extensive measurement campaign is proposed, giving special attention to the comparison of the results when a typical directional antenna for network deployments is used and when a quasi-omnidirectional one is considered. Channel characteristics, such as path loss, shadow fading, root-mean-square delay, Doppler frequency spreads, and the K-factor, are statistically characterized for different suburban scenarios.
               
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