Cameron Matson: Benefits of MIMO in 3D UAV-to-UAV topologies

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) often lack the size, weight, and power to support large antenna arrays or a large number of radio chains. Despite such limitations, emerging applications that require the use of swarms, where UAVs form a pattern and coordinate towards a common goal, must have the capability to transmit in any direction in 3D space from moment to moment. In this work, we design a measurement study to evaluate the role of antenna polarization diversity on single-antenna and multi-antenna UAV systems communicating in arbitrary 3D space. To do so, we construct flight patterns where one transmitting UAV is hovering at a high altitude (80 m) to focus on the impact of heterogeneous drone-based antenna polarization without multipath effects. Then, a receiving UAV hovers at 114 different positions that span an ellipsoid surrounding the transmitting UAV with a radius of approximately 20 m along equally-spaced elevation and azimuth angles. To understand the role of diverse antenna polarizations and multiple antennas, both UAVs have a dedicated radio chain to a horizontally-mounted antenna and a dedicated radio chain to a vertically-mounted antenna, creating four wireless channels. With this measurement campaign, we seek to understand how single-antenna systems could optimally select an antenna orientation or multi-antenna systems could have the greatest gains.