Application of Path-Based Multipath Component Tracking on Air-Ground Channel Measurement Data

Abstract

The operation of unmanned aircraft is unthinkable without reliable wireless communication links: Despite a comparatively high expected level of autonomy of unmanned aircraft, monitoring and remote controlling are required to some degree. As the design of every communication link requires good knowledge on the characteristics of the communication channel, we have performed a measurement campaign to collect channel sounding data for the wireless air-ground channel at C-band. While we have focused on the campaign description and the analysis of the dominant signal component in previous publications, we now concentrate on the detection and tracking of multipath components. In this paper, we present our data processing chain that allows a fast parallel processing of the measurement data, as data dependencies are reduced as much as possible. We furthermore introduce a path-based multipath component tracking approach and apply it to our measurement data. This tracking allows us to estimate the location of reflectors causing multipath component signals. We apply our processing chain to data recorded during take-off at a small airport and compare the results of the reflector localization to a satellite image of the airport to successfully verify our approach.