UAV-Empowered IoT Network With Hardware Impairments and Shadowing

Abstract

This letter investigates the performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication network for energy-constrained Internet of Things devices (IoDs) in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments. Herein, a UAV operates as a radio frequency energy harvesting transmitter for several IoDs and employs the decode-and-forward protocol to relay the gathered information from the IoDs to the base station. We employ a first-order autoregressive method for modeling the relative mobility between the nodes. The log-normal distribution is used to characterize the shadowing components for modeling the composite fading channel. We leverage the Gauss-Hermite quadrature method to obtain accurate expressions for the outage probability, followed by system throughput and energy efficiency.