UAV-Empowered IoT Network With Hardware Impairments and Shadowing

This letter investigates the performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication network for energy-constrained Internet of Things devices (IoDs) in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments. Herein, a UAV operates as a radio frequency energy harvesting transmitter for several IoDs and employs the decode-and-forward protocol to relay the gathered information from the IoDs to the base station. We employ a first-order autoregressive method for modeling the relative mobility between the nodes. The log-normal distribution is used to characterize the shadowing components for modeling the composite fading channel. We leverage the Gauss–Hermite quadrature method to obtain accurate expressions for the outage probability, followed by system throughput and energy efficiency.