An efficient sweeping beamforming technique for low-altitude platform-to-sensor communications

This paper develops a new technique for generating sweeping beams that originated from low-altitude drone platform to improve the communications performance and energy consumption at sensor nodes. The proposed technique uses two-dimensional array weighted by cosine-square amplitude profile with linear phase shift to enhance the received signal strength from sensors which reduces the energy consumption compared with continuous transmission in conventional wireless sensor networks. The analysis of the proposed technique shows that a sweeping area of 200-meter diameter can be served at the sub-drone point using an array of 14 × 14 elements with the proposed amplitude feeding.