Outage Performance Analysis of UAV-assisted Dual-Hop Cooperative Network under Distortions and Interferences

Hardware impairments, co-channel and neighboring channel interferences affecting the communication channels affect the reliability of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) based flying ad-hoc network (FANET). The impact of channel conditions, impairments, and interferences must be evaluated in order to design a system capable of providing quality of service (QoS) in operation. This paper examines the performance of a cooperative network of UAVs in which a source UAV sends data to a destination ground control station (GCS) via intermediate relays using a 2-time slot transmission scheme, half duplexed (HD) transmission mode, and decode-and-forward (DF) protocol of relaying over Rayleigh fading channels using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). A relay with the best channel conditions with destination is selected. For end-to-end SNR and outage probability, closed-form expressions are obtained. The effects of relay count, data rates, channel SNRs, levels of impairments, levels of channel noise variations, and interference levels on system outage probability are studied using Monte Carlo Simulations. The findings suggest that adequate network management is required on UAVs count during UAV-assisted operations, taking into account channel conditions, mission requirements, and equipment quality.