An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight Formation for Enhanced Emergency Communication Based on Conformal Antenna Design

Benefiting from the inherent superiorities in flexibility and mobility, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations for wireless coverage has been of significant interest, especially for rescue services. This work concerns the reliable emergency communication based on commercial micro-sized UAVs due to their high availability and low cost. To decrease the weight overloads and to improve the power efficiency, a UAV body conformal and omnidirectional antenna is first presented based on the characteristic mode analysis. To extend the wireless coverage and to improve the communication quality of the UAV network, a UAV flight formation is then proposed and analyzed. In addition, the propagation analyses for the proposed UAV transmitter designs are performed in a realistic hilly canyon region. Simulations and comparisons are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed designs in emergency communications and performance enhancement through the UAV flight formation.