On the Performance of UAV Relaying with Reconfigurable Antenna and Media Based Modulation in the Presence of Shadowed Fading

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest from the academia and industry most recently. Motivated by the wide usage of UAVs, this paper considers UAV communication with reconfigurable antenna (RA) in the presence of fading and shadowing effects which occur due to tall buildings and skyscrapers in urban areas. More precisely, RA offers to receive information through mirror activation patterns (MAPs) so that it can achieve a receive diversity with decreased error probability by using only one radio frequency (RF) chain. Also, media based modulation (MBM) technique for data transmission with MAPs can be exploited by using RAs with reduced cost. To quantify the performance of the proposed UAV system, we derive a tight upper bound for the overall error probability by considering approximated channel model to the standardization studies for UAVs. The results have shown that RAs can make the overall system more resilient to shadowing and fading effects in terms of error performance, and they are energy efficient.