Reliable and energy-efficient UAV-assisted air-to-ground transmission: Design, modeling and analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a novel reliable and energy-efficient transmission scheme is proposed for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted air-to-ground (A2G) communication. The scheme is tailored to handle burst errors in transmission caused by network collision, switching or interference. Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) mechanism is proposed to enhance the reliability of the A2G communication. By avoiding retransmissions, energy efficiency can be guaranteed. Based on Gilbert-Elliott channel model, we perform a detailed mathematical analysis on the performance of the proposed AL-FEC scheme. The packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency are studied and validated by comprehensive simulations. An application layer Automatic Repeat reQuest (AL-ARQ) protocol based on selective retransmission is used as a baseline scheme and compared with the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed AL-FEC scheme can significantly reduce the energy consumption and ensure the same or even higher application packet delivery ratio compared with the baseline scheme. In addition, the proposed scheme is especially preferable when the channel quality is poor. These specific findings can provide guidance for practical applications relying on UAV-assisted A2G communication, which require reliable and energy-efficient UAV-to-ground transmission in harsh wireless conditions.