UAV-assisted dual-hop RF communication: Performance analysis of outage probability and altitude optimization for multi-user systems

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are growingly used as communication relays in this modern era due to their unique capabilities and advantages which includes enhanced connectivity, cost effectiveness, flexibility, risk reduction and real time data surveillance. UAVs offer a versatile and efficient solution for enhancing communication networks, especially in situations where traditional infrastructure is inadequate or unavailable. In this manuscript, we present the dual hop UAV enabled wireless communication system where the data is broadcasted from Source (S) to Destination (D) through a UAV working as decode and forward (DF) relay (R). The data is transmitted from S to R via Radio frequency (RF) link and then the decoded data from R is forward to D with multiple users. Closed form analytical expressions of outage probability is analyzed which is further utilized to do the optimization analysis to find the optimum altitude of the UAV in order to exaggerate its system performance. Numerical results shows that there is need to find out the optimal altitude of the UAV so as to keep down the overall outage probability of the proposed system and to enhance the system quality. We also find the outage probability at higher Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) to study the system behavior deeply. It is clearly observable from the numerical analysis that the exact outage probability and asymptotic outage probability are exactly matching at higher SNR values concluding the validity of the proposed system. The derived expressions are authenticated by simulated results via Monte Carlo simulations.