Fast Beam Tracking for Base Station and UAV Communications

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is considered more and more often to assist the existing terrestrial communication systems. For UAV assisted cellular system, a critical challenge is the real time beam tracking for the UAV, introduced by the high mobility of it. The beam pointing deviation would result in the severe transmission performance reduction problem. This paper considers the beamforming from the base station to the moving UAV, and proposes a novel localization assisted fast beam tracking mechanism. The location of the UAV is first estimated by the base station with a Bayesian inference based algorithm. Then the beam direction is calibrated using a recursive searching method. Simulation results prove that the proposed beam tracking method can achieve accurate beam alignment within several adjustments. The convergence performance is superior to the existing technique.