A Virtual Full-Duplex Relaying Scheme and Adjustment Algorithms for Enhancing Spectral Efficiency in UAV-Aided Communication Networks

Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as relays has great potential owing to their high mobility in communication networks. To fully exploit this mobility characteristic, we propose a UAV-aided relaying scheme with a data ferrying protocol. By employing two UAVs, our proposed relaying scheme performs virtual full-duplex (FD) transmission to increase the end-to-end spectral efficiency (SE) performance. To further enhance the performance, we propose a center point adjustment algorithm and a transmit power adjustment algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our proposed adjustment algorithms by comparing the relaying schemes with and without the proposed adjustment algorithms. Simulation results show that our proposed relaying scheme with our proposed adjustment algorithms can achieve higher SE performance compared to conventional schemes.