Hardware Impairments Effects on Over the Air System Assisted by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can efficiently serve as fusion centers (FCs) to assist in over-the-air computation (OAC) for rapid data aggregation from massive sensors. However, hardware impairments (HWIs) and imperfect channel state information (CSI) pose challenges to OAC. While previous studies assume ideal hardware and perfect CSI, this paper investigates the joint impact of HWIs and imperfect CSI on the mean square error (MSE) of OAC. This work presents a mathematical framework for average MSE, revealing the negative impact of HWIs and channel estimation error. The results demonstrate the necessity for designs that can improve system performance.