Long Range UAS Mission by LPWAN Communication

Abstract

One of the key challenges for long range Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is the limitation of the communication capability. Many existing communication technics are conventionally adopted in UAS to improve the quality of the communication such as satellite communication, cellular networks, and relay aircrafts. However, the mentioned solutions often incur several drawbacks including costs, complexity, communication delay, or inefficient power consumption. LoRaWAN is one of the recently emerging communication technics used in the Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technology. It has a promising potential to improve the coverage of UAS communication, since it can transmit/receive signals below the noise floor in a very long range with very low energy consumption by using the waveform modulation technique called Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). In this paper, we show the potential of LPWAN as the supplementary communication in UAS. The experiment results show that LoRaWAN can maintain the communication capability beyond 80 km where the popular RF device, RFD900x, has lost its ability to communicate at this distance.

High-altitude balloon platform for studying the biological response of living organisms exposed to near-space environments

“…A position tracker with accurate and reliable long-range wireless communication was required because the scientific payload had to be recovered for postflight analysis. The use of LoRaWAN/LoRa technology is commonly recommended for high-altitude and long-range applications over other technologies, e.g., XBee, NB-IOT, and RFD900x, for these types of usage because it yields better performance for wireless communication over a long distance [ 30 , 31 ]. The LoRa device is used for communication between the tracking system and the ground control station (GCS) in peer-to-peer (P2P) mode.…”