Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted Cellular Communication

In this paper, we consider unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted cellular communications where UAVs are used as amplify-and-forward (AF) relays. The effective channel with UAV-assisted communication is modeled as a Rayleigh product channel, for which we derive a tight lower-bound of the ergodic capacity in closed-form. With the obtained lower-bound, trade-offs between the transmit power and the equipped number of antennas of the UAVs can be analyzed. Alternatively, for a given setting of users and the base-transceiver station (BTS), the needed transmit power and number of antennas for the UAVs can be derived in order to have a higher ergodic capacity with the UAV-assisted communication than that without it.