Drone Assisted Network Coded Cooperation With Energy Harvesting: Strengthening the Lifespan of the Wireless Networks

Next generation wireless systems include battery operated devices which demand higher throughput and a better reliability in an energy efficient fashion. To fulfil these requirements, in this paper, we propose a novel scenario where we include a dynamic Wireless Power Splitting (WPS) factor for Energy Harvesting (EH) at nodes in a Drone Assisted Network Coded Cooperation (DA-NCC) system. The dynamic WPS factor used for EH in DA-NCC system is made more realistic by determining through the probability of Line-of-Sight (LoS) occurrence. Analytical framework is developed for residual Analog Network Coding (ANC) noise and variance of ANC-noise in EH scenario. We also derive the average rate and average outage probability expressions for the proposed channel model. Various algorithms are developed for deciding the Air-to-Ground (A2G) channel distributions, harvesting the energy at relay and source nodes and evaluating the performance metrics of our proposed work. Our investigations reveal that the use of EH in DA-NCC improves the lifespan of the network. Our findings play important roles in disaster management scenarios where cellular connections to base stations are disrupted due to natural calamities and battery constrained drones are deployed for assistance.