Outage Analysis for Leader-Follower Cooperative Flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Directional communication is a crucial technology for reliable and high-speed communication in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation networks. Based on the idea of integrating communication and control, this paper investigates the leader-follower UAV formation network and proposes a outage probability analysis method for the leader-follower UAV formation network. One UAV in the network acts as the leader UAV and guides the entire network, while the follower UAVs exchange their position information to ensure the stability of the formation flight. In this paper, the outage probability of a follower UAV falling outside the coverage of the leader UAV's transmitting beam is analysed taking into account the effect of inter-UAV communication noise, an approximate expression is derived and the upper and lower bounds of the derived results are analysed. The simulation results show that the outage probability introduced in this paper is related to the distance between the leader UAV and the follower UAV, the noise variance and the beam angle of the leader UAV emission, and finally the upper and lower bound analysis is verified by simulation.