Impact of 802.15.4 Radio Antenna Orientation on UAS Aerial Data Collection

This work uses experimental measurements to study the impact of network configuration and flight planning on Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) assisted data collection in a 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 outdoor aerial testbed. Our paper builds on previous work in UAS data collection from 802.15.4 outdoor sensor networks by conducting a novel investigation of the impact of antenna orientation on transceivers with external straight wire antennae. We study the effects of toroidal radiation and antenna polarization on signal strength, and we compare external antenna configurations to the commonly used embedded coiled antenna modules. We model our data using a Zero Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) model. For each hardware configuration and orientation, we identify the optimal altitude to fly a UAS. Our results show that choosing antenna configuration (including type and orientation) for an IoT network depends on the intended UAS collection flight plan.