Outage Analysis of Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle-Assisted Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer System for Industrial Emergency Applications

Abstract

In the scenario of a natural or human-induced disaster, traditional communication infrastructure is often disrupted or even completely unavailable, making the employment of emergency wireless networks highly important. In this paper, we consider an industrial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that restores connectivity from the master terminal unit (MTU) to the remote terminal unit (RTU). The UAV also provides power supply to the ground RTU, which transmits the signal to the end-user terminal (UT) using the harvested RF energy. The MTU-UAV and UAV-RTU channels are modeled through Nakagami-m fading, while the channel between the RTU and the UT is subject to Fisher–Snedecor composite fading. According to the channels’ characterization, the expression for evaluating the overall probability of outage events is derived. The impact of the UAV’s relative position to other terminals and the amount of harvested energy on the outage performance is investigated. In addition, the results obtained based on an independent simulation method are also provided to confirm the validity of the derived analytical results. The provided analysis shows that the position of the UAV that leads to the optimal outage system performance is highly dependent on the MTU’s output power.