Impact of an Interfering Node on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communications

Unlike terrestrial communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have some advantages such as the line-of-sight (LoS) environment and flexible mobility. However, the interference will be still inevitable. In this paper, we analyze the effect of an interfering node on the UAV communications by considering the LoS probability and different channel fading for LoS and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links, which are affected by horizontal and vertical distances of the communication link. We then derive a closed-form outage probability in the presence of an interfering node for all the possible scenarios and environments of main and interference links. After discussing the impacts of transmitting and interfering node parameters on the outage probability, we show the existence of the optimal height of the UAV that minimizes the outage probability. We also show the NLoS environment can be better than the LoS environment if the average received power of the interference is more dominant than that of the transmitting signal on UAV communications. Finally, we analyze the network outage probability for the case of multiple interfering nodes using stochastic geometry and the outage probability of the single interfering node case, and show the effect of the interfering node density on the optimal height of the UAV.