Using airborne vehicle-based antenna arrays to improve communications with UAV clusters

Recently, there have been many proposed applications for clusters of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Some of these applications, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar and video surveillance, can generate large quantities of data which must be transmitted to a base station quickly. UAV size limitations often prevent the use of large, highly directive antennas in this link with the base station. This paper proposes the solution of forming an antenna array from several UAVs and applies antenna array theory to analyze its performance. An example is given where phase compensation is used to achieve high directivity even in the presence of element position errors.