UAVs-assisted Multi-Hop D2D Communication using Hybrid PTS for disaster management

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted communication is a promising technique for assisting ground users in a non-functional area (NFA) or disaster area. All the base stations (BSs) in the disaster area are partially or fully damaged due to the natural calamity. Device-to-device (D2D) communication can be a good solution for direct connection between users in an NFA. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted multi-hop D2D communication for a hybrid power-time switching (PTS). 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 have proposed a time frame for the same and shown a node-based energy harvesting strategy. The expressions of outage probability, and throughput, are developed for the Rician random variable. The impact of parameters such as energy harvesting factor and energy harvesting efficiency on the network performance is also indicated. A simulation model is developed in MATLAB to assess the performance.