Drone-to-Drone Propagation Characteristics in Urban Safety-Critical Scenarios

Abstract

For the future Urban Air Mobility we expect a highly frequented urban air space with many autonomously flying unmanned aircraft, often called drones. In order to mitigate the risk of mid-air collisions in high dense drone scenarios, a robust and reliable information exchange between all airspace users based on direct Drone-to-Drone communication will be an essential part. But due to the high mobility of drones and the strong multipath propagation in urban environments, a communication system must be specifically designed for being able to cope with those challenging conditions. Therefore, we performed a channel sounding measurement campaign in order to investigate the specific Drone-to-Drone propagation characteristics in urban environments and identified stronger multipath components sources for different scenarios in previous work. In this work, we first analyze and present the propagation characteristics for a highly safety-critical scenario, in which the drones are on collision course with changing propagation conditions. Secondly, we use the findings to simulate and discuss the influence on a transmission system. Furthermore, we show when certain propagation effects can be beneficial for the communication in terms of collision avoidance.