Air-to-Air Path Loss Prediction Based on Machine Learning Methods in Urban Environments

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays an important role in many applications because of its high flexibility and low cost. To realize reliable UAV communications, a fundamental work is to investigate the propagation characteristics of the channels. In this paper, we propose path loss models for the UAV air-to-air (AA) scenario based on machine learning. A ray-tracing software is employed to generate samples for multiple routes in a typical urban environment, and different altitudes of Tx and Rx UAVs are taken into consideration. Two machine-learning algorithms, Random Forest and KNN, are exploited to build prediction models on the basis of the training data. The prediction performance of trained models is assessed on the test set according to the metrics including the mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Meanwhile, two empirical models are presented for comparison. It is shown that the machine-learning-based models are able to provide high prediction accuracy and acceptable computational efficiency in the AA scenario. Moreover, Random Forest outperforms other models and has the smallest prediction errors. Further investigation is made to evaluate the impacts of five different parameters on the path loss. It is demonstrated that the path visibility is crucial for the path loss.