Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access With Index Modulation for Air-Ground Multi-UAV Networks
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serve as flexible aerial platforms, enriching air-ground communication networks in various ways. To support massive connectivity within limited time-frequency blocks, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is proposed to be integrated into UAV networks. However, a common issue associated with almost all NOMA schemes is the susceptibility to inter-user interference (IUI). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-UAV cooperative system aided by NOMA with index modulation (IM), termed MCU-NOMA-IM, to improve the performance of air-ground networks by mitigating IUI and also avoiding the successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding method that is prone to error floors. With MCU-NOMA-IM, the information bits pertaining to multiple UAVs are mapped into multiple dimensions, including the modulated symbols, subcarrier indices, and energy allocation patterns. To fully investigate the performance of MCU-NOMA-IM on air-ground networks, we consider scenarios in the presence of three and four UAVs and derive upper-bounds for the bit error rates (BERs). In addition, we propose a multi-clustered-UAV cooperative system aided by NOMA with IM (MCCU-NOMA-IM), which groups closely located UAVs into several clusters to reduce the requirement for time resources. Simulation results demonstrate that both MCU-NOMA-IM and MCCU-NOMA-IM greatly outperform cooperative NOMA and non-cooperative NOMA-IM schemes, especially for distant UAVs when the signal-to-noise ratio is sufficiently high. Also, we show that the derived BER upper bounds are asymptotically tight.
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Scientific Education and Research Foundation, European Commission, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, National Natural Science Foundation of China, HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme, Guangzhou Municipal Science and Technology Project, Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province, CHIST-ERA
Awards: G1190173965, G1266183731, G1463304763, G1617124451, G1924290590, G1972541834, Joint Sensing and Communications for Future Interactive, Immersive, and Intelligent Connectivity Beyond Communications, G2382142159, G2559059231, G271482306, G2987309065, Physics-based wireless AI providing scalability and efficiency, G3472939168, G3531172524, Power-efficient radio interface for sub-7GHz distributed massive MIMO infrastructUres, G4167687697, G4252036489, G4384862669, G4771444529, G509877890, G5941776943, G6282309668, G6683820337, G7080048889, G7760568674, G8568905075, G8921317170
OpenAlex ID: W4402509668