Throughput analysis of RIS-assisted UAV wireless systems under disorientation and misalignment

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive model to evaluate the throughput of RIS-assisted UAV wireless systems, considering factors like multipath fading, hardware imperfections, and beam misalignment, providing insights into optimal transmission strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel closed-form expression for throughput that accounts for disorientation and misalignment, filling a gap in existing analytical frameworks.

Findings

Disorientation and misalignment significantly impact throughput.

Accurate modeling of hardware imperfections improves performance predictions.

An optimal spectral efficiency exists for maximizing throughput.

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned areal vehicles (UAV) communications have been identified as a key enabler of a number of next-generation applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no generalized framework for the quantification of the throughput performance of RIS-assisted UAV systems. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present a comprehensive system model that accounts for the impact of multipath fading, which is modeled by means of mixture gamma, transceiver hardware imperfections, and stochastic beam disorientation and misalignment in order to examine the throughput performance of a RIS-assisted UAV wireless system. In this direction, we present a novel closed-form expression for the system's throughput for two scenarios: i) in the presence and ii) in the absence of disorientation and misalignment. Interestingly, our results reveal the importance of accurate modeling of the aforementioned phenomena as well as the existence of an optimal transmission spectral efficiency.