Polarization Alignment for Cellular-based Mobile Aerial Communication

초록

Cellular communication in the sky will become increasingly important in the near future with the rise of airborne services such as drone taxis. While polarization has traditionally been a secondary concern in terrestrial communication due to multipath and reflections, the dominance of line-of-sight paths in aerial environment makes polarization alignment critical. This study is the first to conduct both experimental and mathematical analyses of polarization alignment to estimate the unknown polarization characteristics of commercial cellular base stations from the aerial device's perspective. We perform real measurements to evaluate these estimations, verifying the base station's practical polarization profile and validating our model. Using this model, we then propose PACMAN, a method that identifies the optimal polarization for each drone position, thereby enhancing alignment and maximizing throughput. By combining polarization prediction with antenna steering, PACMAN improves signal-tonoise- ratio and throughput by 20.7% on average (up to 67% in peak scenarios), offering a novel approach to optimizing cellularbased aerial communication systems.

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