Analysis and optimization of drone assisted decode-and-forward relaying using statistical information

This paper examines a drone assisted decode-and-forward relaying, where an immobile ground-source wants to send symbols to an immobile ground-destination via a half-duplex drone relay. With statistical information including the propagation loss model between air and ground transceivers, heights of antennas of all the nodes in the system and the drone relay’s flight path, ergodic capacity achieved and probability of occurring a propagation outage at the ground-destination are derived, where both the large and small scale fading effects, and the probabilistic line of sight conditions are involved. To maximize the total symbols acquired at the ground-destination while meeting the limit of outage probability, transmit power control of the ground-source and relay nodes is studied subject to the peak and average power restrictions, leading to an optimal power control algorithm. Computer simulations are conducted and the results confirmed that the derived ergodic capacity and outage probability expressions are accurate; by implementing the proposed power control algorithm, more communication opportunities with guaranteed level of quality of service are available, while the ground-source and the drone relay consume less energy than the compared baseline scheme.