Channel-Aware Adaptive Antenna Systems for UAV-Assisted and Vehicular Wireless Communication Networks

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is also being incorporated within the vehicular wireless communication networks in order to improve coverage, reliability, and continuity of the services, especially within a very dynamic and infrastructure-constrained environment. Vehicular-to-vehicle wireless links in UAV-assisted vehicular-to-everything (V2X) systems face the extreme and rapid channel variations due to high vehicular mobility, motion of UAVs, Doppler, shadowing and line-of-sight (LoS)-non-line-of-sight (NLoS) channel transitions. Traditional fixed/static antenna systems cannot readily adjust to all these time-varying channel characteristics causing the beam to be misaligned, resulting in peak interference, and poor communication performance. The paper presents a channel embracing adaptive antenna system in the UAV-assisted vehicular communication networks. The proposed methodology takes advantage of real time channel state information (CSI) to dynamically change antenna radiation properties, including antenna beam direction, beamwidth and beamforming weights, in reaction to changes in the channel caused by mobility. It uses a hybrid analog-digital beamforming architecture that balances the performance and the complexity of implementation and mobility-aware channel estimation that helps to track the Doppler effects, and the variation of links. Comprehensive simulations are carried out at realistic altitudes of UAVs, vehicular speed and air to ground channel conditions. The findings prove that the suggested channel-aware adaptive antenna design is much better than the traditional fixed-beam antenna systems in terms of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, achievable throughput, and chance of outage, especially in high-mobility conditions. The above results affirm that channel-aware antenna control is a viable and effective solution of physical-layer design to increase the resilience and reliability of the next-generation UAV-assisted V2X communication V2X networks.