evitably occur if we measured the different links using separate
UAV flights. All of our 32 traces contain data points that lie
at most several milliseconds apart, which is short enough to
regard many physical parameters of the environment constant.
For example, it may take several hundreds of milliseconds for
the bank angle of the UAV to change enough to appreciably
affect the receiver’s position in the antenna pattern. This is
also long enough that we can fairly compare many interesting
properties for the 32 links, such as throughput, signal strength
and packet loss.
III. MEASURED THROUGHPUT AS A FUNCTION OF
ANTENNA ORIENTATION
In this section, we report the throughput measurement
results, based on which we compare the performance of several
different antenna configurations and identify the best one.
As described in Section II, in the experiments, the UAV
node was constantly sending out UDP packets at 6Mbps, or
1.5Mbps from each of the four transmit antennas. By counting
the number of received packets at a receive antenna in a short
period of time, we can measure the instantaneous performance
of that particular antenna orientation configuration, which we
will call “the UDP throughput.” We use this throughput as
the main performance metric in evaluating various antenna
orientation configurations.
The total flight time in the two flights reported is approx-
imately 24 minutes, during which the UAV node sent out
more than 2.4 million packets. The total number of packets
received at the eight antennas of the four ground nodes is
about 1.8 million; however, most of the packets are received
by more than one antenna, and therefore, the achieved end-to-
end throughput, averaged over all antennas, is merely 120.8
kbps. Due to the relatively large flight area, the UAV node
and the ground nodes are out of each other’s communication
range for a significant portion of time. For this reason, out
of all possible antenna orientation configurations, even the
best configuration (horizontal transmit antenna to elevated
horizontal receive antenna) only receives about 33% of the
packets. We plot the UDP throughput of the top four best-
performing antenna configurations versus distance in Figure 6.
There are four curves in Figure 6. Following the order
described in the legend, the topmost curve represents the
throughput achieved from a horizontally oriented dipole an-
tenna on the UAV node to another horizontally oriented dipole
antenna on an elevated ground node; this combination is the
best antenna orientation configuration we have seen in this
experiment. The second topmost one differs from the previous
one in that the ground node is not elevated. By comparing the
two, we can see that an elevation of 14 feet helps achieve
a significantly higher throughput. The third curve shows the
throughput from a vertically oriented dipole antenna on the
UAV node to another vertically oriented dipole antenna on a
ground node. It is interesting to note that, although inferior
to other three configurations when the distance is small, this
configuration actually outperforms the two horizontal config-
urations in which the ground node is not elevated when the