On the Performance of UAV Relaying with Reconfigurable Antenna and Media Based Modulation in the Presence of Shadowed Fading

TL;DR

This paper evaluates UAV communication systems using reconfigurable antennas and media-based modulation to improve error performance and energy efficiency in urban environments with shadowed fading.

Contribution

It introduces a UAV communication model with reconfigurable antennas and media-based modulation, deriving an error probability bound considering shadowed fading effects.

Findings

Reconfigurable antennas enhance system resilience to shadowing and fading.

The proposed system achieves lower error probabilities compared to traditional setups.

Energy efficiency is improved through the use of MAPs with a single RF chain.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest from the academia and industry most recently. Motivated by the wide usage of UAVs, this paper considers UAV communication with reconfigurable antenna (RA) in the presence of fading and shadowing effects which occur due to tall buildings and skyscrapers in urban areas. More precisely, RA offers to receive information through mirror activation patterns (MAPs) so that it can achieve a receive diversity with decreased error probability by using only one radio frequency (RF) chain. Also, media based modulation (MBM) technique for data transmission with MAPs can be exploited by using RAs with reduced cost. To quantify the performance of the proposed UAV system, we derive a tight upper bound for the overall error probability by considering approximated channel model to the standardization studies for UAVs. The results have shown that RAs can make the overall system more resilient to shadowing and fading effects in terms of error performance, and they are energy efficient.