Experimental analysis of multipoint-to-point UAV communications with IEEE 802.11n and 802.11ac

The commercial availability of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) opens new horizons for applications in disaster response, search and rescue, event monitoring, and delivery of goods. An important building block is the wireless communication between UAVs and to base stations. Design of such a wireless network may vary vastly from existing networks due to aerial network characteristics such as high mobility of UAVs in 3D space. This paper presents experimental performance results with commercially available UAVs. First, we show throughput results for IEEE 802.11ac in a UAV setting. Second, we demonstrate that IEEE 802.11n can have much higher throughput over longer ranges than reported in [1] and [2]. Third, we analyze the fairness in a multi-sender aerial network. Fourth, we test a real-world coverage scenario with two mobile UAVs sending to a single receiver. Performance analysis considers the rate adaptation mechanism in both indoor and outdoor line-of-sight scenarios.