UAV‐assisted multi‐hop D2D relaying for communication in large disaster area.

Summary: An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)‐assisted communication is a promising technique for enabling ground users in a non‐functional area (NFA) or disaster area to communicate. All the base stations in the disaster area may be partially or fully damaged due to the natural calamity. Device‐to‐device (D2D) communication can be a viable solution for immediate connection between users in an NFA. We propose a UAV‐assisted multi‐hop D2D communication following a hybrid power‐time switching (PTS) in this paper. Moreover, a D2D user of a cluster can communicate with another D2D user in a different cluster through UAVs. However, D2D users can harvest energy from their respective ad hoc energy stations and forward the information to the nearby D2D user following a hybrid PTS‐based strategy. We propose a time frame for the same and show a node‐based energy harvesting strategy. The expressions of outage probability, throughput, end‐to‐end energy consumption, and energy efficiency are developed for the Rician and Nakagami‐m faded channel. The impact of several network parameters such as energy harvesting factor, energy harvesting efficiency, and fading parameter on the network performance is also indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]