Achieving air-ground communications in 802.11 networks with three-dimensional aerial mobility

Increasing availability of autonomous small-size aerial vehicles leads to a variety of applications for aerial exploration and surveillance, transport, and other domains. Many of these applications rely on networks between aerial nodes, that will have high mobility dynamics with vehicles moving in all directions in 3D space and positioning in different orientations, leading to restrictions on network connectivity. In this paper, we propose a simple antenna extension to 802.11 devices to be used on aerial nodes. Path loss and small-scale fading characteristics of air-to-ground links are analyzed using signal strength samples obtained via real-world measurements at 5 GHz. Finally, network performance in terms of throughput and number of retransmissions are presented. Results show that a throughput of 12Mbps can be achieved at distances in the order of 300m.