Analysis of UAV Wobbling Effects on Wireless Communication

Abstract

With recent advances in autonomous technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have become an important component of modern wireless networks because they can be integrated in aerial relaying, surveillance, and data collection. However, since there is no fixed infrastructure, UAVs are objects for constant movement and vibrations caused by aerodynamic forces and environmental factors, thus, creating a significant challenge for reliable communication. It was shown in several studies that these fluctuations can severely degrade channel performance, particularly at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies where directional beamforming is highly sensitive to misalignment. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis is to study the impact of UAV wobbling on wireless channel characteristics in both air-to-ground (A2G) and air-to-air (A2A) communication scenarios. With the majority of existing studies focusing on A2G links, the effects of wobbling in A2A systems, where both transmitter and receiver are mobile, remain less explored. To address this gap, a comprehensive mathematical model of UAV wobbling is developed to capture jittering influence on channel behavior. The proposed model will be evaluated using key performance metrics including spectral efficiency, coherence time, and outage probability. But more importantly, this study will explore potential mitigation techniques to reduce wobbling-induced channel degradation. In particular, a multi-panel antenna architecture is proposed as a low-complexity solution to improve link reliability under dynamic orientation changes. The findings of this theses demonstrate even though in higher frequencies UAV wobbling can severely impact the channel reliability, the proposed multi-panel configuration effectively mitigates beam misalignment. These findings contribute to the design of robust and efficient UAV-enabled communication systems for future aerial networks.