Simple Virtual Turbo Codes for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Communications

In this paper, we propose a power-efficient Turbo coding scheme for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for disaster areas. In this system, UAV is functioning as an extension of mobile cognitive radio base station (MCRBS) to build networks in disaster areas. Both MCRBS and UAV require efficient use of power to provide longer duration of services. The proposed Turbo coding scheme is a simple virtual Turbo codes involving MCRBS and UAV, where the Turbo decoding combines signal from both MCRBS and UAV. The proposed codes are constructed from Convolutional and Accumulator codes that consume low power, because the codes are having memory of one bit. We evaluate the performance of the proposed codes in terms of bit-error-rate (BER) under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels via a series of computer simulations. We also evaluate the proposed codes with two elevation angles of
$45^{\circ}$
and
$90^{\circ}$
configurations. We found that the proposed codes can remove error-floor even though the signals from the direct link are not available due to the block in disaster situations. The results of this paper are expected to contribute to the development of coding techniques of UAV for disaster recovery network.