Performance evaluation on path diversity in radio links between unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper presents a performance evaluation on path diversity introduced in a wireless network established by unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aircrafts (UAs). One of usage scenarios of the wireless network established by UAs is establishment of a temporal communications instead of disrupted terrestrial networks due to a massive disaster. In order to evaluate system performance based on this usage scenario, we have conducted the following simulations; first, radio propagation characteristics between UAs flying over different two conditions have been simulated, after that, system simulations have been carried out over radio channels derived by simulations. Results regarding radio propagation reveal that characteristics including path loss and RMS delay are highly depend on not only altitude of the deployed UAs, but also its polarization of radio signal. System simulations based on the channel impulse responses obtained by propagation simulations, in which IEEE802.11g is utilized as specifications of the radio system, show that path diversity introduced by deploying multiple UAs brings remarkable improvement on achievable throughputs.