An Efficient Post-Disaster Communication System: Performance Analysis and Optimization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a communication system that is efficient for post-disaster situations such as natural disasters or man-made situations like wars. The proposed system utilizes two new techniques, namely reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to help the source in sending its message to destination. To investigate the performance of the proposed system, we use accurate closed form approximations of channel distributions to derive closed form approximations for the outage probability (OP) and average symbol error probability (ASEP) assuming independent non identically distributed (i.ni.d.) fading channels. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic OP at the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime to get more insights into the system performance. We also study some practical scenarios related to RISs, UAV, and destination locations and illustrate their impact on the system performance through simulations. Finally, we formulate and solve two optimization problems with the objective of minimizing the total OP. The first problem focuses on optimizing the transmit power allocation at both the source and the UAV, while the second problem optimizes the UAV location.