Outage and Rate Evaluation of Drone based Decode and Forward Cooperation for Hybrid Fading Channels

—In this paper, we consider a drone as a relay in Co-operative Communication (CC) to improve the network performance in an upcoming wireless network. Drone Assisted CC (DA-CC) is more useful when the central coordinator (base station) gets disrupted. In such a scenario, the drone works as an aerial relay and provides CC diversity to the end-users. In this article, a Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocol is used as a relaying scheme at the drone, and the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) scheme is used at the end-users for combining the direct and relayed signal. Here, we assume Nakagami faded channel among Air-to-Ground (A2G) links and Rayleigh faded distribution between Ground-to-Ground (G2G) links. The performance of DA-CC is evaluated in a hybrid channel environment and compared based on drone height, rate, horizontal distance, and transmitted power with the existing Rayleigh and Nakagami faded distributions. The analytical expression of outage probability and the rate have been derived for analysis purposes, and Monte-Carlo simulations are used to verify the analytical results. This work can have security and surveillance applications to improve the network performance in the absence of a central base station.