General Outage Probability Model for UAV-to-UAV links in Multi-UAV Networks

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) swarms have become increasingly ubiquitous in the civilian domains due to their maneuverability and scalability in collaborative flying missions. However, there is a lack of characterization of wireless communication performance in multi-UAV system without being constrained by the node spatial distributions. In this paper, the performance of a UAV swarm network is analyzed by characterizing the effects of the UAV-to-UAV (U2U) interference in terms of the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). To this end, a closed-form analytical model for the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the SINR is derived by considering both deterministic and stochastic channel processes, as well as deterministic UAV mobilities. The derived model can be used to analyze U2U interference in a UAV swarm network for any arbitrary node locations. Using this model, the effects of the network parameters on various network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as the outage probabilities and channel capacity rate are studied. The model is extended to incorporate hybrid LoS channels, and the general model is used to evaluate the temporal evolutions of network outage probability given the UAV trajectories. With this, the main advantage of the model in analyzing the baseline outage probabilities of multi-UAV deployments is showcased.