With growing interest in mmWave connectivity for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a basic question is whether networks intended for terrestrial service can provide sufficient aerial coverage as well. To assess this possibility, in urban environments specifically, extensive system-level simulations are conducted using a generative channel model recently proposed by the authors. It is found that standard downtilted base stations at street level, with typical microcellular densities, can indeed provide satisfactory UAV coverage. Interestingly, this coverage is made possible by a conjunction of antenna sidelobes and strong reflections. With sparser deployments, the coverage is only guaranteed at progressively higher UAV altitudes. Additional base stations dedicated to UAV communication, rooftop-mounted and uptilted, would strengthen the coverage provided that their density is comparable to that of the standard deployment, and would be instrumental for sparse deployments of the latter.

The work is partly based on

• Xia, W., Rangan, S., Mezzavilla, M., Lozano, A., Geraci, G., Semkin, V., & Loianno, G. (2020). Millimeter Wave Channel Modeling via Generative Neural Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.11006