Environment-Aware Green UAV-Assisted, CubeSat Communication Network Energy Efficiency, and Outage Probability Analysis

Abstract

Rapid advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), and energy harvesting (EH) technologies can be leveraged to design and develop green and reliable cooperative Cube satellite communication (CSC) systems and networks. In this work, we propose a novel cooperative CSC system model comprising green UAVs as intelligent relays equipped with IoT sensors, intelligent processing and EH modules, and transceivers. Using a novel and intelligent probabilistic transmission policy (PTP) that we propose, CubeSats can conserve energy by deactivating transmissions in unfavorable weather conditions based on control signals from the smart UAV via a telemetry link. We extend this model to include multiple CubeSats and analyze it by deriving and evaluating network energy efficiency and its lower bound. Our numerical plots show that the proposed PTP significantly outperforms the continuous transmission policy (CTP). At a specific transmission probability of 0.125, PTP is 40 times more energy efficient than CTP. We extend the work and develop a novel and insightful performance analysis for energy efficiency outage (EEO) probability. Specifically, we derive closed-form approximate expressions for EEO probability and present numerical results. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of clustered CSC networks (CSCNs) and present numerical results to assess EEO probability, providing valuable insights for future large-scale green CSCN design and deployment.