Harnessing the Potential of Omnidirectional UAVs in RIS-Enabled Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an omnidirectional UAV design with RIS to improve wireless coverage in obstructed areas, optimizing orientation, location, and phase shifts to significantly enhance data rates.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel omnidirectional UAV (o-MRAV) design that overcomes control limitations of traditional UAVs with RIS, enabling independent orientation and location adjustments.

Findings

28% improvement in minimum data rate

14% increase in average data rate

Effective optimization using PSCA technique

Abstract

Multirotor Aerial Vehicles (MRAVs) when integrated into wireless communication systems and equipped with a Reflective Intelligent Surface (RIS) enhance coverage and enable connectivity in obstructed areas. However, due to limited degrees of freedom (DoF), traditional under-actuated MRAVs with RIS are unable to control independently both the RIS orientation and their location, which significantly limits network performance. A new design, omnidirectional MRAV (o-MRAV), is introduced to address this issue. In this paper, an o-MRAV is deployed to assist a terrestrial base station in providing connectivity to obstructed users. Our objective is to maximize the minimum data rate among users by optimizing the o-MRAV's orientation, location, and RIS phase shift. To solve this challenging problem, we first smooth the objective function and then apply the Parallel Successive Convex Approximation (PSCA) technique to find efficient solutions. Our simulation results show significant improvements of 28% and 14% in terms of minimum and average data rates, respectively, for the o-MRAVs compared to traditional u-MRAVs.