On the Outage Performance of Drones-Aided Cooperative D2D communications systems

The advanced Device-to-Device (D2D) system is recognized as one of the key emerging technologies to support the increasing wireless data traffic of fifth generation (5G) systems and beyond. In this paper, we aim to study a novel cooperative D2D communications concept to improve the communication between the D2D users. In this model, multiple drones are included in the network and operate as half duplex amplify-and-forward (AF) relays scheme and the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) method is employed at the receiver side to combine the relayed signals. The effect of various parameters on the outage probability is investigated, including drone altitude placement, number of drones, and transmission power. Simulation results indicate that the outage probability of the cooperative D2D solution is greatly improved whenever an additional drone is added to the cooperative system.