Real-time ray-based channel generation and emulation for UAV communications

A real-time ray-based hardware emulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication channels which suits for the Three-Dimensional (3D) dynamic scenarios and considers the movements of both terminals is developed in this paper. The time-variant channel parameters, i.e., ray delay, ray gain, and ray Doppler frequency are precalculated in the host by using the Ray Tracing (RT) method. Meanwhile, RT simulation dramatically increases the number of valid rays. To address the problem of resource limitation and huge computational burden in the implementation, an efficient ray coefficients generation method based on iteration is proposed and implemented. With the advantages of low cost and high flexibility, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware platform is used to emulate the ray-based UAV channels by utilizing the compact architecture including the Time-Division (TD) scheme and Tapped-Delay Line (TDL) for channel convolution. Finally, hardware measurement results demonstrate that the properties of emulated channel, i.e., Power Delay Profile (PDP) and Doppler Power Spectrum Density (DPSD) consist with the simulated ones, which verifies the correctness of hardware implementation. The proposed channel emulator provides an efficient way for optimization, verification, and evaluation of UAV communication systems.