Unlicensed Technology Assessment for Uas Communications

Abstract

Effective Remote Identification of unmanned aircraft is critical to their integration into civil airspaces. This paper assesses the ability of proposed unlicensed technologies (Bluetooth and WiFi) to support Remote Identification, and also creates a framework for modeling communication performance for unmanned aircraft, both at scale. Through simulation, we show that most currently commercially available Bluetooth and WiFi implementations would require significant ground antenna support in order to be able to avoid saturation situations at even low demand rates. We also show the flexibility of the simulation framework to study regional coverage and the effect of tuning different parameters on performance.