Envelope Level Crossing Rate and Average Fade Duration of a Generic 3D Non-Stationary UAV Channel Model

Abstract

For the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication scenarios, the time-varying fading characteristics cased by the three-dimensional(3D) scattering environment and 3D trajectory have an important impact on establishing the reliable communication link. In this paper, a generic 3D non-stationary geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) for UAV channels is developed. Different from the traditional 3D GBSMs, the proposed model takes the 3D arbitrary trajectories of UAV into account. On this basis, two important second-order statistical properties of fading envelope, i.e., the level crossing rate (LCR) and average fading duration (AFD), are investigated and derived in details. The obtained closed-form expressions are explicit functions of flight parameters and compatible with the results in the previous works. Numerical simulations show that the simulated results are in accordance with the theoretical and measurement data under 3D flight scenarios. The proposed model and statistical properties can be applied to the optimal design of channel coding and block interleave schemes for UAV communication systems.