An analysis of communication performance according to antenna directionality in UAV operation environment

In recent years, Network Centric Warfare (NCW) is widely accepted as a prominent concept in the future warfare. In particular, the collection of information by using the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) while minimizing exposure to enemy forces is becoming an important concept to take advantage of an efficient war. The characteristic selection of the antenna for efficient utilization of UAV is an important part and it can improve or decline the performance of wireless systems. Especially, the choice of the directional and omni-directional antennas is an important factor to determine the distance, which can be the maximum transmission range of data. In this paper, we analyze the distance effect by using two types of antennas (i.e., omni-directional and directional antenna) in order to obtain the optimized communication range between two stations (i.e., moving and fixed station). To achieve this goal, we perform a simulation study by means of QualNet 4.5 simulator and analyze the results by using modeling and simulation method.