Outage performance analysis of antenna selection schemes in UAV-assisted networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of various antenna selection (AS) techniques in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted relay communication system, wherein a UAV is deployed as a flying relay to establish and sustain a communication link between source and destination nodes. The AS schemes under study encompass transmit antenna selection/maximal ratio combining (TAS/MRC), joint transmit and receive antenna selection (JTRAS), and maximum ratio transmission/receive antenna selection (MRT/RAS). We present a unified outage probability (OP) performance analysis of AS techniques in UAV relay networks. We initially derive a closed-form expression for the OP under Nakagami-m fading channels. Subsequently, an asymptotic expression elucidating the array and diversity gain is derived to offer deeper insights into the performance of the studied system. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical results.