A Study on Beamforming for Coverage of Emergency Areas from UAVs

In this paper we present a study on the use of beamforming (BF) for devices discovery from flying platforms, typically Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This type of application is meant to be exploited in emergency scenarios characterized by the absence of a network infrastructure; the purpose is to search and identify the devices (and consequently the persons) spread in a limited area without the possibility of connecting to a mobile network. The use of an antenna array from the UAV is supposed to increase the sensitivity towards devices with weak signals and/or difficult propagation conditions. Our preliminary results indicate the effectiveness of a scanning method based on BF techniques for discovering and detecting terminals on the ground. The numerical results provide an insight on the capability level of BF solutions in these conditions w.r.t. to the size of the area to be covered.