Performance Comparison of Lambertian and Non-Lambertian Drone Visible Light Communications for 6G Aerial Vehicular Networks

Increasing reported works identify that drones could and should be sufficiently utilized to work as aerial base stations in the upcoming 6G aerial vehicular networks, for providing emergency communication and flexible coverage. Objectively, light-emitting diode (LED) based lighting devices are ubiquitously integrated into these commercially available drone platforms for the general purposes of illumination and indication. Impresively, for further enhancing and diversifying the wireless air interface capability of the above 6G aerial vehicular networks, the solid-state light emitter, especially LED-based visible light communication (VLC) technologies, is increasingly introduced and explored in the rapidly developing drone communications. However, the emerging investigation dimension of spatial light beam is still waiting for essential research attention for the LED-based drone VLC. Up to now, to the best of our knowledge, almost all LED-based drone VLC schemes are still limited to conventional Lambertian LED beam configuration and objectively reject these technical possibilities and potential value of drone VLC schemes with distinct non-Lambertian LED beam configurations. The core contribution of the study is overcoming the existing limitation of the current rigid Lambertian beam use, and comparatively investigating the performance of drone VLC with non-Lambertian LED beam configurations for future 6G aerial vehicular networks. Objectively, this work opens a novel research dimension and provides a series of valuable research opportunities for the community of drone VLC. Numerical results demonstrate that, for a typical drone VLC scenario, compared with about 6.40 Bits/J/Hz energy efficiency of drone VLC based on the baseline Lambertian LED beam configuration with the same emitted power, up to about 15.64 Bits/J/Hz energy efficiency could be provided by the studied drone VLC with a distinct non-Lambertian LED beam configuration. These results show that the spatial LED beam dimension should be further elaborately explored and utilized to derive more performance improvement of the 6G aerial vehicular networks oriented drone VLC.