Joint Processing of Pilot and Data in UAV-aided Maritime Communications

Abstract

Considering the channel aging effect in maritime communications, we explore the potential gain of joint processing for maritime system capacity enhancement. Besides using a typical composite channel model including both small-scale fading and large-scale fading, we study a dynamic channel model which channel fluctuation is common offshore. We first introduce two unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided maritime communication models. By analyzing the mutual information of joint processing, we derive the closed-form expression of lower bound for the achievable rate. Simulation results indicate that joint processing can take full advantage of the channel state information contained in received data signals, and it gives rise to a satisfying spectral efficiency. Meanwhile, the joint processing shows a good performance when the ship user sails far away from the serving UAV. In addition, joint processing is not noise-limited, when the signal-to-ratio is low at sea, the joint processing can still provide a relatively high spectral efficiency.