Performance Analysis of Three-Dimensional MIMO Antenna Arrays for UAV channel

In recent year, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been attracting an increasing amount of attention with the rapid growing demand of the high data rate communication service on Internet of Things (IoT). However, as a vital fundamental prerequisite of the research on UAV communication technology, the UAV channel model are still at its infancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel Three-Dimensional (3D) Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) channel model for UAV under Air-to-ground (A2G) communication environment by introducing Von-Mises Fisher (VMF) scattering distribution. Furthermore, the spatial fading correlation of different Power Angle Spectrum (PAS) is derived and the channel capacity of UAV MIMO systems deploying different antenna arrays (such as ULA, UCA, URA) is investigated. Finally, the simulation results confirm the performance analysis and show that the proposed model is proved to evaluate the real UAV channel for A2G communication environment precisely.