Aerial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Enabled URLLC UAV Systems

In this paper, we propose an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) system to support the stringent constraints of ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). Specifically, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) employed onboard RIS panels can act as repeaters to reflect the signal from macro base station (MBS) to all users in the networks. To overcome the dense networks’ interference, we propose to use zero-forcing beamforming and time division multiplexing access (TDMA) scheme where each UAV can serve a number of users in its own cluster. We formulate a optimisation framework in terms of UAVs’ deployment, power allocation at MBS, phase-shift of RIS, and blocklength of URLLC. Due to highly nonconvex and complex optimisation problem, we first consider to use a deep neural network (DNN) to solve the optimal UAVs’ deployment. Then, the optimal resource allocation is proposed to provide the maximal reliability of the considered system with respect to the users’ fairness. From the representative numerical results, our proposed scheme is shown to superior to other benchmarks which exhibits the positive impact of aerial RIS in supporting stringent demands of URLLC.