Performance analysis for energy efficient communications aided by UAV with reconfigurable intelligent surface

Abstract

SummaryThe continuous growth of wireless connectivity and the emergence of the concept of the Internet of Everything in the future sixth‐generation (6G) network require a new communication paradigm. Different from the prior works that focus on performance optimization for communication networks, in this paper, we attempt to analyze the energy efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication aided by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) which is a new disruptive technology, for the reason that UAV has the line‐of‐sight (LoS) link transmission and flexibility and RIS has the low power for improving the communication reliability and network coverage. At firstly, when central limit theorem (CLT) assumption is used and the number of RIS reflecting elements is large, we derive the closed‐form expression of the average signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) of each user based on the new BS‐RIS‐user communication link and RIS‐user/BS association. Following this, we further gain the energy efficiency (EE) in closed‐form based on random access between BS and user. Finally, we further show the performance of EE under certain assumptions. In particular, the offered results demonstrate that the use of the RIS can significantly improve EE due to RIS assist in improving the SINR and has very low transmission power; meanwhile, the UAV equipped with RIS can also improve EE for the reason that RIS can be used as a mobile relay to take advantage of the LoS link transmission.