Wireless routeing scheme for UAV-assisted access networks based on the link path loss

In this work, a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is aimed to function as relay nodes that provide a multi-hop wireless link between ground users. The communication route between the sender and receiver is established with awareness of the link path loss between the cooperating UAV relay nodes. Then, Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm is used to find the optimal route that has the minimum total path loss among all other possible routes. MATLAB simulation results show a high-performance gain when using Dijkstra’s algorithm for establishing the communication route compared with the baseline approach in which the route is formed based on the shortest-distance path through the UAV relay nodes. It is worth mentioning that both shadow fading and nonfading radio environments were taken into account. Moreover, the performance is further improved when the standard deviation of shadow fading increases. The work also investigates the probability of selecting each of the UAV nodes in forming the multi-hop link considering the total simulated realizations. Here, it is shown that more variability is observed in the indexes of the traversed UAV nodes when routeing through a random fading environment compared to a nonfading environment.