Outage and Throughput Performance of Half/Full-Duplex UAV-Assisted Co-Operative Relay Networks Over Weibull Fading Channel

The usage of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a cooperative mobile relay is considered to be a promising technique to enhance the performance of future wireless networks. This paper studies the system performance of a dual hop decode and forward, full/half duplex (FD/HD) UAV assisted relay systems, in the presence of direct link between source and the destination. A radio frequency based energy harvesting mechanism underlying simultaneous wireless information and power transfer technique is employed at the UAV to improve the system energy efficiency. For the proposed system design, we derive a closed-form expression for outage probability and system throughput with respect to the key metrics such as transmit power and time splitting factor over generalised weibull fading channel. The impact of self-interference effect on the system performance is studied in different aspects. The obtained results demonstrated that, increasing the fading parameter $$(\beta)$$ improves the overall system performance, significantly. In addition, FD operation with selection combining at the receiver offers an improved performance as compared to HD systems. Finally, the numerical simulation results are given, in order to validate the derived expressions.