Investigation in Free Space Optical Communication Links Between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

In-Band LOS Discovery Between Drones Using Highly Directional Transceivers

“…The received power and the communication range of an FSO transceiver is affected by Lambertian loss, atmospheric attenuation and geometric attenuation. Accordingly, we calculated the received power P r cv of a node's transceiver from the following relations [17]: −(P t + P r ) < 10 log 10 e −σ R cos δ + 10 log 10 ζ γ + 200βR cos δ 2 (12) P r cv = P r × cos δ (13) where, R is the distance between the nodes in meters, δ is the radial distance of a node from its neighbor's beam's axis of propagation, P t is the transmitter's source power in dBm, P r is the received power along beam normal in dBm, γ is the transmitter radius in cm, ζ is the receiver radius in cm, β is the divergence angle of transmitter in mRad. The messages used for the three-way handshake 'Hello', 'H-Ack' and 'Ack' were considered to be 38 bytes and data rate was 1Mbps, which gives packet transmission time of ≈300µs [1].…”

“…UAVs or drones are also considered for both civil and military missions, such as monitoring of an area hit by a disaster, broadcasting data at some sports events or even observing behind the enemy lines. All these different applications of drones are imagined to produce large amounts of data to be delivered to a ground station or other drones [12]. Using directional transceivers, these large volumes of data can be transferred at extremely high speeds.…”

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

“…Through the construction of airmobile relay, the fast establishment of a high capacity transmission link between fixed ground terminals is realized. On the other hand, in the application fields such as disaster relief, security, and transportation, UAVs often need to complete high-speed data transmission and instruction issuing with mobile terminals such as vehicles and robots [ 7 , 29 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. For this kind of scenario, the mobile characteristics of UAVs and ground terminals must be fully considered, and a solution with high applicability and high availability is proposed to truly release the potential and efficiency of this kind of fusion technology.…”

“…Based on the above considerations, the industry proposes to introduce OWC technology into the field of UAVs, to greatly improve the wireless transmission capacity of UAVs by mining rich spectral resources. Based on the original UAV–satellite link, UAVs link, UAV–ground terminal link, and UAV–sea surface link, optical wireless modules and subsystems are integrated into various UAVs and terminals respectively, to build a light-wave-based link with high speed, high security, and orientation [ 25 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ].…”

Improved IMMPF Tracking Methods for Airborne Laser Communication

“…Due to diversity of maneuvering forms, it is impossible to accurately describe the movement of airborne communication platform with the simple model, it is necessary to adopt the Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) methods for airborne platform tracking system; the basic idea of the multiple model estimation approach is to assume a set of models M for the hybrid system (Leitgeb et al, 2007;Fidler et al, 2010). Particle Filter (PF) algorithm can be used to estimate any state and measurement of nonlinear/non-Gaussian system, the theoretical basis of PF is the Monte Carlo simulation based on sequential importance sampling; PF has a broader scope of application and better filtering performance than series of EKF algorithm (Farrell, 2008;Koichi and Tsujimural, 2006).…”