Wireless DF Relaying with Beamforming for an Unmanned Aircraft System over ??? Fading Channels

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying network with beamforming for an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) over ??? fading channels. The ?–? fading model is a general fading model that models wireless fading channel perfectly in line-of-sight (LOS) propagation environments and includes Nakagami-m, Rician, Rayleigh, and One-sided Gaussian fading channels as special cases. We consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a moving relay for forwarding the data signals from a source ground station (GS) to a destination GS. Our proposed system considers multiple antennas at the source and destination, whereas the relay has a single antenna. We derive a closed-form expression for the outage probability in terms of the generalized Marcum Q-function. We carry out the performance analysis by means of derived expression for the various antenna arrangements, distinct values of radius, and different values of fading parameters. Our results show that the number of antennas and fading parameters, ? and ?, have a positive relation with system performance. The analytical results are validated through Monte Carlo simulations.