Integrating GPS Sensor and Beamforming for UAV Tracking Algorithm

Abstract

Integrating flight sensor data into beamforming technology in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications is an attractive solution. Due to the movements and perturbations of UAV, maintaining beam alignment is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose an integrated flight sensor data and beamforming algorithm for UAV tracking. We can reduce the beam training overhead drastically with the global positioning system (GPS). However, due to relatively large errors and a long period of the GPS signal data, we consider exploiting beamforming to persist the beam alignment even when the GPS signal is absent. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the performance compared to a GPS-single system. In addition, the proposed algorithm can accomplish high beamforming gain with less beam training overhead compared to the conventional beamforming algorithm.