TY - JOUR
T1 - Multiple UAVs as Relays
T2 - Multi-Hop Single Link Versus Multiple Dual-Hop Links
AU - Chen, Yunfei
AU - Zhao, Nan
AU - Ding, Zhiguo
AU - Alouini, Mohamed Slim
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received April 30, 2018; revised July 18, 2018; accepted July 18, 2018. Date of publication August 1, 2018; date of current version September 10, 2018. The work of N. Zhao was supported in part by the Open Research Fund of the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, under Grant 2018D03, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant DUT17JC43. The work of Z. Ding was supported in part by the U.K. EPSRC under Grant EP/P009719/1 and in part by H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 under Grant 690750. Part of this paper was presented at the IEEE 87th Vehicular Technology Conference, Porto, Portugal, June 2018 [1]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was R. Dinis. (Corresponding author: Nan Zhao.) Y. Chen is with the School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2002-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2018/9
Y1 - 2018/9
N2 - Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found many important applications in communications. They can serve as either aerial base stations or mobile relays to improve the quality of services. In this paper, we study the use of multiple UAVs in relaying. Considering two typical uses of multiple UAVs as relays that form either a single multi-hop link or multiple dual-hop links, we first optimize the placement of the UAVs by maximizing the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio for three useful channel models and two common relaying protocols. Based on the optimum placement, the two relaying setups are then compared in terms of outage and bit error rate. Numerical results show that the dual-hop multi-link option is better than the multi-hop single link option when the air-to-ground path loss parameters depend on the UAV positions. Otherwise, the dual-hop option is only better when the source-to-destination distance is small. Also, decode-and-forward UAVs provide better performances than the amplify-and-forward UAVs. The investigation also reveals the effects of important system parameters on the optimum UAV positions and relaying performances to provide useful guidelines.
AB - Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found many important applications in communications. They can serve as either aerial base stations or mobile relays to improve the quality of services. In this paper, we study the use of multiple UAVs in relaying. Considering two typical uses of multiple UAVs as relays that form either a single multi-hop link or multiple dual-hop links, we first optimize the placement of the UAVs by maximizing the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio for three useful channel models and two common relaying protocols. Based on the optimum placement, the two relaying setups are then compared in terms of outage and bit error rate. Numerical results show that the dual-hop multi-link option is better than the multi-hop single link option when the air-to-ground path loss parameters depend on the UAV positions. Otherwise, the dual-hop option is only better when the source-to-destination distance is small. Also, decode-and-forward UAVs provide better performances than the amplify-and-forward UAVs. The investigation also reveals the effects of important system parameters on the optimum UAV positions and relaying performances to provide useful guidelines.
KW - Placement
KW - relaying
KW - unmanned aerial vehicle
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85050994796&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TWC.2018.2859394
DO - 10.1109/TWC.2018.2859394
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85050994796
SN - 1536-1276
VL - 17
SP - 6348
EP - 6359
JO - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
IS - 9
M1 - 8424236
ER -