Low Overhead Drone Relaying in Dense Urban and Suburban Environments

Abstract

This paper studies a drone relay assisted cooperative wireless communication system. Specifically, a drone is used as the relay node to establish communication between the base station and an aerial mobile terminal under realistic channel models with the consideration of line-of-sight probability. The total transmission time is divided into smaller time slots and in each time slot the relay uses decode-and-forward protocol to forward the received information to the mobile terminal. Then, an optimization problem is formulated where the objective is to maximize the sum rate over the whole transmission time. The formulated problem is non-convex. However, we show that for several cases the global optimal solution can be achieved. Moreover, we develop a low-complexity algorithm to find suboptimal solutions for the other cases.