Performance analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-enabled Wireless Networks
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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As an indispensable part of mobile communication systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be leveraged to complement terrestrial networks by providing coverage to areas where infrastructures are scarce. Equipped with self-navigation and strong automation, UAVs have extensive applications to environmental monitoring, disaster recovery, search and rescue, owing to their excellent agility and autonomy. As a result, an increasing demand arises for ubiquitous connectivity and reliable communication for data exchange between UAVs, and between UAVs and ground stations. Since UAVs operate in three-dimensional (3D) space with strong manoeuvrability, random trajectories and wireless propagation environment can pose significant challenges to the study on coverage and capacity of UAV networks. On the other hand, UAVs are increasingly posing threats to information security. UAVs can be potentially used to eavesdrop and jam wireless transmissions between legitimate terrestrial transceivers. It is of practical interest to understand the robustness of terrestrial wireless communications under exposure to new threats from aerial adversaries. This thesis studies the coverage and capacity, including secure coverage and secrecy capacity, of UAV-enabled wireless networks with UAVs flying under 3D random trajectories based on stochastic geometry and measure convergence theory. The detailed contributions of this thesis are summarised as:
• Capacity analysis of UAV networks under random trajectories. We geometrically derive probability distributions of UAV-to-UAV distances and closed-form bounds for the capacity can be obtained by exploiting the Jensen's inequality. We extrapolate the idea to dense UAV networks and analyse the impact of network densification and imperfect channel state information on the capacity.
• Connectivity analysis of uncoordinated UAV swarms. New closed-form bounds are derived for the outage probability of individual UAVs, and broadcast connectivity of each UAV which evaluates the reliability of broadcast across the swarm. The qualifying conditions of the bounds on 3D coverage and impact of ground interference on the outage are identified.
• Secure connectivity analysis in UAV networks. We propose a trust model based on UAVs’ behaviour and mobility pattern and characteristics of inter-UAV channels. We derive analytical expressions of both physical and secure connectivity probabilities with/without considering Doppler shift.
• Secrecy capacity analysis against aerial eavesdroppers. We analyse ergodic and ϵ-outage secrecy capacities of ground link in the presence of cooperative aerial eavesdroppers. The “cut-off” density of eavesdroppers under which the secrecy capacities vanish is identified. By decoupling the analysis of random trajectories from random channel fading, closed-form approximations with almost sure convergence to the secrecy capacities are devised.
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