Distributed Transmit Beamforming for UAV to Base Communications

Distributed transmit beamforming (DTB) is very efficient for extending the communication distance between a swarm of UAVs and the base, particularly when considering the constraints in weight and battery life for payloads on UAVs. In this paper, we review major function modules and potential solutions in realizing DTB in UAV systems, such as timing and carrier synchronization, phase drift tracking and compensation, and beamforming vector generation and updating. We then focus on beamforming vector generation and updating, and introduce a concatenated training scheme, together with a recursive channel estimation and updating algorithm. We also propose three approaches for tracking the variation of channels and updating the vectors. The effectiveness of these approaches is validated by simulation results.