Android cellular experiments measure 4G LTE and 5G NR performance from a UAV with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Android phones. Each phone connects to the private AERPAW Ericsson 4G/5G network as a user equipment (UE). It logs radio key performance indicators (KPIs) and measures throughput with an iPerf client that sends traffic to an iPerf server on an AERPAW fixed node.
A UAV carries a small portable node (SPN) that holds up to two Android phones on custom mounts. A companion computer on the SPN controls the phones, receives the KPIs from the phones, and logs them together with GPS and UAV attitude data. At the end of the experiment, AERPAW gives the experimenter the logs for post-processing.
Published campaigns used the private Ericsson non-standalone (NSA) network at the Lake Wheeler Road Field Labs. It has an LTE carrier in band 66 (5 MHz) and an NR carrier in band n77 at 3.4 GHz (100 MHz).
6.1.7.1) PawPrints - an open-source AERPAW app that runs on a Samsung S21 and uses the standard Android APIs. It logs 4G and 5G KPIs, the phone position, and iPerf throughput.
6.1.7.2) Nemo - the Keysight Nemo Handy app on a Samsung phone with modified firmware. It gives modem-level KPIs that the standard Android APIs do not give, such as MCS, CQI and channel rank.
Both phones can fly on the same UAV in one experiment. Use PawPrints for the basic KPIs and Nemo when you need the modem-level 5G KPIs.
These experiments run in testbed mode only. Emulation mode (the digital twin) does not support the phones. Select the SPN-Android node in the AERPAW user web-portal, and then follow the steps on the PawPrints or Nemo page.
PawPrints source code (AndroidApp, Server and PostProcessing repositories)
S. Singh et al., Modeling and Analysis of Air-to-Ground Cellular KPIs in a 5G Testbed using Android Smartphones, IEEE Aerospace Conference, March 2026.
A. H. F. Raouf et al., Curated Wireless Datasets for Aerial Networks Research, 2026.