Affordable Quality of Service Assessment for Cellular-Connected UAV Communications

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)have been used extensively in military and civilian fields, making the research on cellular-connected UAVs a popular topic forFifth Generation (5G) and beyond communications. In order to support the increasing amount of applications, it is essential to evaluate the performance of UAV communications. In this work, the end-to-end delay, packet success rate, and through put of Air-to-Ground (A2G) communications are evaluated based on a realistic channel model obtained from measurements. The measurement campaign, conducted in a suburban environment, includes both Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Obstructed Line-of-Sight(OLoS) scenarios. From the results, it can be seen that architectural elements close to the flight route can severely decrease the communications performance even when the visibility between the Base Station (BS) and the UAV is permanently ensured. Moreover, we have shown that the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for critical communications proposed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) can be fulfilled by establishing a threshold on the received Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR). This way, the SINR can be used as a condense dperformance metric for the design of safe flight routes for critical communications for UAVs.