DroneCAST - Physical Layer Design and Measurement-based Simulation Analysis for Urban Drone-to-Drone Communication Scenarios

In order to mitigate midair collisions, a reliable and fast information exchange based on direct Drone-to-Drone (D2D) communication will be one key factor for the realization of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). However, the expected high-density traffic scenarios with highly mobile airspace users, combined with the fast-changing and rich multipath propagation channel characteristics of urban environments pose unique challenges for communication systems. Therefore, in previous work we proposed DroneCAST (Drone Communications and Surveillance Technology) as a first step towards a novel D2D communications and surveillance system tailored to the specific requirements of a future urban airspace. In this work, we present and discuss our design decisions on the physical layer of DroneCAST, which is based on considerations on the specific propagation characteristics of urban D2D channels. Furthermore, we evaluate the design by analyzing the impact of several transmission parameter with different communication channels from three different measured D2D scenarios within software simulations. Our simulation framework implements the physical layer of DroneCAST and simulates transmitting the physical waveform over different communication channels as well as considers nonideal real world effects of a transmission system.