Statistical Characterization of RIS-assisted UAV Communications in Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks Under Channel Aging

This paper studies the statistical characterization of ground-to-air (G2A) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted air-to-ground (A2G) communications with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks under the impact of channel aging. We first model the G2A and A2G signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) as non-central complex Gaussian quadratic random variables (RVs) and derive their exact probability density functions, offering a unique characterization for the A2G SNR as the product of two scaled non-central chi-square RVs. Moreover, we also find that, for a large number of RIS elements, the RIS-assisted A2G channel can be characterized as a single Rician fading channel. Our results reveal the presence of channel hardening in A2G communication under low UAV speeds, where we derive the maximum target spectral efficiency (SE) for a system to maintain a consistent required outage level. Meanwhile, high UAV speeds, exceeding 50 m/s, lead to a significant performance degradation, which cannot be mitigated by increasing the number of RIS elements.

Channel Characterization of UAV-RIS-aided Systems with Adaptive Phase-shift Configuration

This letter considers a UAV aiding communication between a ground transmitter and a ground receiver in the presence of co-channel interference. A discrete-time Markov process is adopted to model the complex nature of the Air-to-Ground (A2G) channel, including the occurrence of Line-of-Sight, Non-Line-of-Sight, and blockage events. Moreover, an adaptive phase-shift-enabled Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is deployed to combat A2G blockage events. Novel frameworks based on the shadowed Rician distribution are proposed to derive closed-form expressions for Ground-to-Air/A2G SINR' distributions. Numerical results show that RISs with large numbers of elements, e.g., 256 RIS elements, improve end-to-end Outage Probability (OP) and reduce blockages.

User Association Optimization for IRS-aided Terahertz Networks: A Matching Theory Approach

Terahertz (THz) communication is a promising technology for future wireless communications, offering data rates of up to several terabits-per-second (Tbps). However, the range of THz band communications is often limited by high pathloss and molecular absorption. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRSs) to enhance THz communication systems. Specifically, we introduce an angle-based trigonometric channel model to evaluate the effectiveness of IRS-aided THz networks. Additionally, to maximize the sum rate, we formulate the source-IRS-destination matching problem, which is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. To solve this non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem, the paper proposes a Gale-Shapley-based solution that obtains stable matches between sources and IRSs, as well as between destinations and IRSs in the first and second sub-problems, respectively.

Adaptive Decoding Mechanisms for UAV-enabled Double-Uplink Coordinated NOMA

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive decoding mechanism (ADM) for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled uplink (UL) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communications. Specifically, considering a harsh UAV environment where ground-to-ground links are regularly unavailable, the proposed ADM overcomes the challenging problem of conventional UL-NOMA systems whose performance is sensitive to the transmitter's statistical channel state information and the receiver's decoding order. To evaluate the performance of the ADM, we derive closed-form expressions for the system outage probability (OP) and throughput. In the performance analysis, we provide novel expressions for practical air-to-ground and ground-to-air channels while taking into account the practical implementation of imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) in UL-NOMA. These results have not been previously reported in the technical literature. Moreover, the obtained expression can be adopted to characterize the OP of various systems under a Mixture of Gamma (MG) distribution-based fading channels. Next, we propose a sub-optimal Gradient Descent-based algorithm to obtain the power allocation coefficients that result in maximum throughput with respect to each location on UAV's trajectory, which follows a random waypoint mobility model for UAVs. Numerical solutions show that the ADM significantly improves the performance of UAV-enabled UL-NOMA, particularly in mobile environments.

Aerial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, we propose and investigate an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (aerial-RIS)-aided wireless communication system. Specifically, considering practical composite fading channels, we characterize the air-to-ground (A2G) links by Namkagami-m small-scale fading and inverse-Gamma large-scale shadowing. To investigate the delay-limited performance of the proposed system, we derive a tight approximate closed-form expression for the end-to-end outage probability (OP). Next, considering a mobile environment, where performance analysis is intractable, we rely on machine learning-based performance prediction to evaluate the performance of the mobile aerial-RIS-aided system. Specifically, taking into account the three-dimensional (3D) spatial movement of the aerial-RIS, we build a deep neural network (DNN) to accurately predict the OP. We show that: (i) fading and shadowing conditions have strong impact on the OP, (ii) as the number of reflecting elements increases, aerial-RIS achieves higher energy efficiency (EE), and (iii) the aerial-RIS-aided system outperforms conventional relaying systems.