On Throughput for UAV Relay Assisted for Use in Disaster Communications

In this paper, the system performance of an energy harvesting (EH) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system for use in disasters was investigated. The communication protocol was divided into two phases. In the first phase, a UAV relay (UR) harvested energy from a power beacon (PB). In the second phase, a base station (BS) transmitted the signal to the UR using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA); then, the UR used its harvested energy from the first phase to transfer the signal to two sensor clusters, i.e., low-priority and high-priority clusters, via the decode-and-forward (DF) technique. A closed-form expression for the throughput of the cluster heads of these clusters was derived to analyze the system performance. Monte Carlo simulations were employed to verify our approach.