UAV- Enabled D2D Vehicular Communication Network: Link Selection and Outage Analysis

In this work, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted device-to-device (D2D) vehicular communication network that integrates the cellular link from a base station (BS). We minimize the system outage while ensuring reliability for individual vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-UAV links. To achieve this, we consider a generalized Nakagami-
$m$
fading distribution for the communication links in the network and utilize distinct fading parameters for various vehicle-to-everything links. We propose a novel selection and routing scheme to dynamically select between UAV and BS links for cellular vehicular communication. We explore redundancy strategies for data transmission and provide a comparative analysis that demonstrates that the single-copy multi-path (SCMP) routing strategy performs better than the single-copy single-path (SCSP) routing strategy, utilizing the UAV link judiciously in scenarios with poor signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio in the vehicle-to-infrastructure network while maintaining a similar power requirement. We also observe that the multi-copy multi-path routing scheme performs better than SCMP and SCSP for scenarios without power constraints.