Towards UAV Aerial Base Station Networking Robustness: A Jitter-Aware Antenna Selection Perspective

Random jitter poses significant impacts on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base-station (BS) networking, as it may cause beam misalignment during the communication transmission for aerial UAV BS. To address this issue, in this paper, we present a robust transmission scheme to combat the jitter effects. Based on a three-dimensional jitter model, we first analyze the random variation in the angle of departure of the channel, and its impact on the communication rate. Using the insight of the analysis, we then propose a jitter-aware antenna selection scheme for UAV BS, which can identify optimal antenna set to maximize the average achievable rate given the statistics of jittering. Simulations demonstrate that through jitter-aware antenna selection optimization, the performance of aerial UAV base-station networking can be significantly improved, and the optimal number of antennas for transmission depends on factors such as the elevation angle and the jitter variances.