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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2014, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (1): 223-229.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2013.0292

• Electronics and Control • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A Statistical Area Coverage Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as Relay Platforms

ZHU Qiuming1,2, ZHOU Shengkui1, HUO Shuaike1, CHEN Xiaomin1, XU Dazhuan1   

  1. 1. College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China;
    2. China Airborne Missile Academy, Luoyang 471009, China
  • Received:2013-03-26 Revised:2013-05-28 Online:2014-01-25 Published:2013-06-04
  • Supported by:

    National Natural Science Foundation of China (61172077, 61172078); Aeronautical Science Foundation of China (20120152001); China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(2013M541661); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (NS2012075,NZ2012012); Funds for the Postgraduate Creative Base in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (kfjj130115); Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions

Abstract:

Traditional area coverage models for the airborne relay of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) fail to take the channel fading into consideration. A new statistical area coverage model is proposed in this paper based on the outage probability for wireless relay communications with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Firstly, the fading of the relay channel, including path loss, shadowing and multipath fading, is modeled by composite fading distribution. Then, an expression in the form of outage probability for coverage radius is derived and a numerical computation method is provided. The simulations show that channel fading has a great effect on coverage radius, which is only half of the radius in a non-fading situation when the outage probability is below ten percent. These findings are of considerable significance for optimal UAVs arrangement as well as the flight control and performance analysis of the relay networks with UAVs.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), relay platform, coverage area, channel modeling, outage probability

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