Performance Analysis of UAV Relay Assisted IoT Communication Network Enhanced with Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This paper investigated the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays' assisted network in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems enhanced with energy harvesting in order to overcome the large-scale fading between source and sink as well as achieve the green cooperative communications, where time switch (TS) and power splitting (PS) strategies were typically applied for UAV relays to implement energy harvesting transmission, which was also selected via signal to noise ratio (SNR) maximization criterion so that the terminal node can obtain the optimal signal. Meanwhile, it was worth noting that the terminal node may be disturbed by aggregated interference caused by dense network signaling interaction in the future 5G/B5G systems. Therefore, after TS and PS protocols designing and utilizing, the closed-form expressions of outage probability and bit error rate (BER) for UAV relay assisted IoT systems suffered from aggregated interference were derived in detail. In addition, the throughput and delay limited state of UAV relay assisted transmission were also analyzed thoroughly. The derivations and analysis results showed that the proposed multi-parameter joint optimization of transmitting power, scaling factor, and UAV relay selection could effectively improve the system throughput and reduce the system outage probability and BER. The simulation experiments verified the effectiveness of the proposed schemes and the correctness of theoretical analysis.