IRS-Assisted UAV Communications with Imperfect Phase Compensation

Abstract

<div>This work presents a performance analysis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted wireless</div><div>communications systems, where one of the UAVs supports intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS). As the</div><div>estimation and compensation of the end-to-end phase for each propagation path is prone to errors, imperfect</div><div>phase compensation at the IRS is taken into consideration. The performance is derived in terms of symbol</div><div>error rate (SER) and outage probability, where the phase error is modeled using the von Mises distribution.</div><div>The air-to-air (A2A) channel for</div><div>each propagation path is modeled as a single dominant line-of-sight (LoS) component, and the results are</div><div>compared to the Rician channel model. The obtained results reveal that the considered A2A model can be</div><div>used to accurately represent the A2A channel with Rician fading.</div>

Capacity Analysis of IRS-Based UAV Communications with Imperfect Phase Compensation

“…where ν = As reported in [4], the PDF f B3 (b 3 ) does not have a closedform expression. Therefore, the capacity will be evaluated using the same approach of L = 2, but the integrals will be solved numerically.…”

“…For air-to-air channels, the signal typically has a strong line-of-sight (LoS) component and a small number of weak scattered components; thus, the small scale fading of such channels follows the Rician distribution. However, according to experimental measurements, the Rician factor K for ground-to-air and airto-air channels is more than 15 dB, and the received signal power may remain constant for long time periods [2]- [4], [14], [15]. Therefore, it can be assumed that the channel coefficients A 1 , A 2 , .…”

“…Recently, flying base-stations (BSs), or UAV based BS (UAV-BS), have been introduced to provide integrated access and backhaul (IAB) with wide coverage area, high capacity and ultimate connectivity. Moreover, the deployment of flying networks of various types of UAVs, including small drones and high altitude flying platforms, is expected to provide reliable and high transmission rate wireless communications as reported in [3], [4], and references therein.…”

“…In [11], a statistical model is employed to characterize the phase compensation error caused by imperfect channel estimation and phase quantization. However, the bit error rate (BER) and outage probability have been discussed in [4] and [11], while the achievable capacity with random phase compensation errors has not been investigated yet.…”

“…In addition to being considered separately, the synergy of IRSs and UAVs is considered as a promising solution for supporting reliable wireless communications in future generations such as the sixth generation (6G) and beyond [4], [12]. Fig.…”