Outage Analysis of Dual-hop UAV-Assisted Links Considering Orientation Fluctuations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely proposed as an efficient solution to maintain wireless connectivity in emergency scenarios in which ground infrastructure is partially or fully damaged. To this end, a dual-hop UAV-assisted system is addressed in this work where the source, relay and destination can be either a ground-based or a UAV, which leads to eight different system setups. A mathematical framework is followed to obtain the cumulative distribution functions (CDF) of the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the different setups, which are utilized to characterize the outage probability in closed form expressions of the eight different system setups. Monte Carlo simulations are obtained to validate the analytical formulas, which show exact matching over the whole SNR range in all system setups considered. Moreover, the impact of other operational parameters including antenna elements, fluctuation parameters and path loss parameters on the outage rate are in detail investigated.