Joint Optimization of Dynamic Topology and AAR for UAV-ARIS Under Hardware Damage Suppression

In existing UAV communication systems incorporating active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ARIS), hardware impairments (HIs) in transceivers and thermal noise from active units are frequently overlooked. This oversight leads to signal distortion at user terminals and excessive system power consumption. To address these challenges, this study proposes a solution to enhance signal transmission quality by jointly optimizing the dynamic topology of an ARIS and the average achievable rate (AAR) for users. Firstly, to mitigate inter-element interference in the ARIS, a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is proposed. This algorithm integrates the global search capability of genetic algorithms with the local optimization efficiency of the tabu search algorithm (TSA) to iteratively derive the optimal dynamic topology matrix for the ARIS. Secondly, to maximize the AAR by increasing received signal power, fractional programming with quadratic transformation is combined with semidefinite relaxation and successive convex approximation to tackle the highly coupled multi-variable non-convex fractional programming problem. This approach transforms subproblems into single-variable convex optimizations. Finally, an alternating iterative method is employed to solve the convex subproblems, yielding a suboptimal solution. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed UAV-ARIS dynamic topology optimization scheme improves the system AAR by 27–130% and energy efficiency by 19–32% compared with conventional schemes, while ensuring flexible deployment and high energy efficiency.