Outage performance of cooperative relay protocol on UAVs-based flying adhoc network

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are getting increased strength and count day by day in various civilian and military applications. The UAVs can form flying ad-hoc networks (FANET) to send data to a distant ground control station through multihop relaying. However, due to typical features of UAVs and limitations posed by areas of deployment, achieving efficient data dissemination with quality of service is a challenging task in such networks. Different algorithms have been reported in literature however, physical layer transmission issues need to be investigated more in such networks. In this work, we consider dual-hop cooperative communication using a single relay in a downlink communication scenario. A data dissemination scheme based on cooperative relaying is proposed to ensure reliability in operation. The performance of a non-buffer aided dual-hop relay network of UAVs considering the hardware impairments is analyzed. The end-to-end SNR analysis and derivation of the probability of outage expressions for both regenerative and non-regenerative modes of communication working in a half-duplexed fashion are presented. Monte Carlo Simulations verify the analytical results and depict that our proposed cooperative communication scheme improves the system performance compared to compulsory direct and compulsory indirect communication. The system achieves performance improvement at lower data rates using hardware without impairments working on Rayleigh fading channels in an urban environment. Results display that the fading distribution coefficients have a strong impact on system performance.