Analysis of Harmful Interference to and from Aerial IEEE 802.11 Systems.

Civil Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enable a manifold of exciting new services. UAVs are about to be part of our everyday lives. The range of applications is very broad, ranging from swarms of UAVs that can be used for 3D modeling and surveillance of large areas, to search and rescues and fire fighter missions. An important cornerstone for the development of civil UAVs is communication technology. To ensure lightweight and cheap UAV technology, it is necessary to use existing commodity communication technology and chip-sets for UAV communications. Yet, the impact of the novel aerial and high altitude propagation context on those technologies needs to be understood. In this paper, we analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11 communication, both experimentally and by means of simulation. It is shown that the aerial context results in very different communication performance for an 802.11 network compared to the typical terrestrial context. Decreased shadowing gives a larger number of networks that can be seen, resulting in higher interference and packet loss due to collisions.