Cooperative communication in 3-UAVs: Performance analysis with BICM transmission

In this paper, the idea of Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation has been applied to cooperative transmission among three UAVs which exchange important mission data for cooperative control. Both decode and Forward as well as Amplify and forward transmissions are considered and the results are also compared with direct transmission when the UAVs share information without sharing. The positional configurations include V-shaped flight, line and random. The channel model has been extended to general case, where the communicating terminals can have multiple antennas and there are multiple relays. Assuming perfect channel state information, it has been observed that amplify and forward outperform direct and decode and forward transmission in most scenarios.