3D Mobility Models and Their Impact on the Outage Performance of UAV Communications

This letter derives new three-dimensional (3D) mobility models and analyzes their impact on the outage performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. Specifically, new hybrid mobility (HM) models for the UAV movement in 3D space are derived by merging one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) mobility models in the vertical and horizontal directions, employing both random distance (RD) and random waypoint (RWP) models. Then, closed-form expressions of the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) for the random distances between ground user and the UAV are obtained. Using these CDFs, the outage probability of the UAV communications system is calculated. Numerical results demonstrate the severe impact of different mobility models on the outage of the considered system.