CSI Measurements and Initial Results for Massive MIMO to UAV Communications

Abstract

Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) has been envisioned as a key component of the sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication system. Meanwhile, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in enabling and deploying NTNs. In this paper, we focus on massive multi-input multi-output (MaMIMO) supported UAV communications, where channel state information (CSI) was measured considering different heights and trajectories of a rotary-wing drone. To characterize the propagation channel for this air-to-ground link, some initial results were analyzed, such as stationary distance. To investigate the impact of channels on communication performance, we analyzed spectral efficiency (SE) by using Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC). This study shows that the presented space-time-frequency channel dataset facilitates channel correlation analysis and supports performance evaluation for MaMIMO-UAV communications.