IRS-assisted low altitude passive aerial relaying

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted low altitude passive aerial relaying system. This ensures that more users can be served with better wireless channels. The flexibility of the UAV-based relay carrying the IRS can passively provide better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to compensate the performance degradation at the edge of cells or in the period of heavy traffic. In particular, the UAV-based IRS can generate an equivalent line-of-sight (ELoS) channel to transform the conventional Rayleigh fading channel into a Rician fading channel, which will significantly improve the performance of urban mobile communications. Closed-form expression for the outage is derived, and numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed UAV-IRS passive relaying scheme.