Performance analysis of multi-carrier relay-based UAV network over fading channels

The performance analysis of multi-carrier relay-based Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) network is studied analytically over fading channels. A relay-based topology with one ground control unit (GCU) is assumed, where the cooperative UAVs can communicate with the GCU directly or through relay. The outage probability of the system is defined as the probability that either the transmission rate over any of the links drops below a predefined minimum threshold for that link or the Relay-GCU link is not able to transmit the aggregate data from all relayed UAVs. Finite Mixture with Expectation-Maximization algorithm is utilized to derive a simple approximate expression for the probability density function (pdf) of the achievable bit rate assuming adaptive M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM). The outage probability and the average achievable bit rate of a cooperative multi-carrier system are derived over generalized Gaussian-Finite-Mixture fading channels.