Enabling Smart Port Connectivity via UAV-IRS Assisted Relaying

This study aims to provide a seamless wireless transmission at reliable and high data rates in maritime communication through intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology. The problem is that especially sizable vessels (i.e., blocking ships) cause severe shadowing for smaller ships (i.e., victim ships) that happen to be behind the blocking ones in a harbour environment, causing a reduced signal strength that would drop the communication link. IRS is employed in this study to mitigate the shadowing problem by relaying the signal from the terrestrial base station to the victim ships in order to bypass the aforementioned blockages. Moreover, IRS elements are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to position the IRS relay dynamically in the air. In this regard, single-and multiple-ship scenarios are considered in order to analyze the impacts of the number of ships and positioning of UAV-IRS relay on the communication performance. Decode-and-forward (DF) relaying is utilized as a benchmark mechanism, and data rate and outage probability metrics are used for the evaluation. The obtained results demonstrate that as the base station transmission power increases, the performance of the IRS relay approaches to the DF relay in terms of outage probability and data rates; for example, a 5% better data rate performance is observed when the base station transmission power is 55 dBm.