Impacts of Obstacles and Jittering on Coverage and Throughput Performance of Large-Scale UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have been recognized as an important component of future wireless networks, due to the UAVs’ inherent maneuverability and flexibility. However, ultra-dense located buildings and the jittering of the UAVs may significantly degrade the performance of UAV wireless networks. Against this backdrop, this paper analyzes the coverage and throughput performance of three-dimensional UAV networks, taking the probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) channel and the outdated channel state information introduced by the obstacles and the UAVs’ jittering, respectively, into account. By leveraging the tools from stochastic geometry, the analytical expressions for the coverage probability and throughput in large-scale UAV networks are derived. Through numerical results, the correctness of our derived expressions is validated. In addition, it is shown that the coverage probability and throughput performance of the considered UAV networks can be significantly improved by judiciously selecting the deployment density of the UAVs, even in the presence of blockage and jittering. The results presented in this work provide valuable insights into the design and deployment of large-scale UAV networks in practical implementations.