A New Propagation Channel Synthesizer for UAVs in the Presence of Tree Canopies

Following the increasing popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for remote sensing applications, the reliable operation under a number of various radio wave propagation conditions is required. Assuming common outdoor scenarios, the presence of trees in the vicinity of a UAV or its ground terminal is highly probable. However, such a scenario is very difficult to address from a radio wave propagation point of view. Recently, an approach based on physical optics (PO) and the multiple scattering theory (MST) has been proposed by the authors, which enables fast and straightforward predictions of tree-scattered fields at microwave frequencies. In this paper, this approach is developed further into a generative model capable of providing both the narrowband and wideband synthetic time series of received/transmitted signals which are needed for both UAV communications and remote sensing applications in the presence of scattering from tree canopies. The proposed channel synthesizer is validated using both an artificially-generated scenario and actual experimental dataset.