Optimum Placement of UAV as Relays

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations or relays are becoming increasingly important in communications. In this letter, the optimum placement of a relaying UAV for maximum reliability is studied. The total power loss, the overall outage, and the overall bit error rate are derived as reliability measures. The optimum altitude is investigated for both static and mobile UAVs. Numerical results show that different reliability measures have slightly different optimum altitudes and that decode-and-forward is better than amplify-and-forward.