Effect of User Mobility and Channel Fading on the Outage Performance of UAV Communications

Abstract

Many wireless networks operate in a mobile environment with randomly moving user terminals. This letter analytically characterizes the impact of ground user mobility, propagation environment and channel fading on the outage performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability using the random waypoint model for ground user mobility, UAV channel models for different propagation environments and the Nakagami-m model for fading channels are derived. Furthermore, the outage analysis takes into account the effect of co-channel interference by both the stationary and mobile users. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the interplay between the communication performance and the system parameters.