Improving the Performance of HALE UAV Communication Link Through MIMO Cooperative Relay Strategy

High-altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (HALE UAVs) are military and strategic UAVs that fly above the ground in the stratosphere. The ability of stealth technology and long flight time, has led to use of these UAVs for various military missions such as interception and spying, control guidance, remote sensing, navigation, surveillance and others. In this paper, improving the performance of HALE UAVs communication through multiple input multiple output (MIMO) cooperative relay with amplitude-and-forward strategy is investigated. In clear sky (without rain), two-hop system with line of sight (LoS) channels from source to relay and relay to destination is considered. In LoS-MIMO channels, due to correlation between the sub-channels, neither high-rank MIMO channel nor maximum capacity are achieved. However, based on antennas optimum placement that provide orthogonally between the received signals, maximum capacity will be obtained. The proposed scheme in this paper dramatically increases capacity relative to LoS-SISO channel and dual-hop MIMO Rayleigh up to 6 b/s/Hz and 2 b/s/Hz respectively. Also, simulation results verify exactness analytical expressions. However, rain as one of the most important ambient conditions causes the signal to be scattered in different directions. Therefore, LoS channel is changed to fading (Rayleigh) channel by increasing rainfall. In this case, telecommunication range is proposed as a meaningful metric, and outage probability (P_outage) based on telecommunication range for N-hop channel is extracted. In rainy conditions, simulation results show, the telecommunication range dramatically increases by increasing the number of relay UAVs for specified outage probability so that in the long-range, the outage probability decreases up to 50% with the increasing number of relays.