As an emerging solution for line-of-sight (LOS) wireless communications, in air-to-ground (A2G) channels, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and allowing the dynamic and flexible network deployments enables the supplement or/and replacement of the terrestrial base stations (BSs). However, in conventional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, high-speed communications are significantly limited by channel crosstalks and spectrum scarcities. An orbit angular momentum (OAM) wireless network, allowing co-existence of multiple physical channels within the same frequency band, offers new degrees of freedom to address this dilemma. In this paper, we investigate the UAV-based A2G radio vortex wireless networks and study its channel model. Then we propose a branch and bound search-based mode selection (BBS-MS) scheme, which uses the spatial distribution characteristics of vortex beams to optimize the spectrum efficiency (SE). Theoretical derivations and numerical results demonstrate that our developed BBS-MS scheme can obtain the optimal performance, which outperforms conventional OAM-based MIMO systems. Also, it possesses a lower complexity compared with exhaustive searches.
Keywords: air-to-ground (A2G); branch and bound search-based mode selection (BBS-MS); line-of-sight (LOS); orbit angular momentum (OAM); spectrum efficiency (SE); unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).