Outage Analysis of Multicarrier Full-Duplex Cooperative UAV-to-UAV Communications System

Direct and reliable communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) facilitate various promising technologies such as UAV-aided relaying, collision avoidance in UAV swarms, and UAV-assisted multi-access edge computing. Moreover, UAVs can act as aerial base stations to provide inexpensive rural and remote coverage. This letter proposes a multicarrier full-duplex (FD) cooperative UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communications system wherein the UAV transmitter (UT) works as an FD relay for cellular uplink transmission. In return, a portion of cellular subcarriers is utilized by UT for its own transmission to the UAV receiver (UR). An analytical framework incorporating the conventional height-dependent three-dimensional (3-D) channel model characterized by a large-scale path loss and a small-scale fading is utilized to derive cellular and U2U outage probabilities. The results demonstrate that U2U communications with a substantial outage performance is feasible while maintaining a minimal cellular outage constraint. Specifically, the U2U outage probability of the order 10−7 can be achieved while maintaining the cellular outage constraint of 10−3.