On Providing Energy Harvested Multi-hop D2D Communication with UAV Bridge in Disaster Area

In the event of a natural disaster such as a flood, cyclone, or tsunami, often the communication infrastructure gets damaged or becomes non-functional. In such scenarios, small cells covered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used to extend seamless cellular connectivity to the non-functional area (Mozaffari et al. in 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), IEEE, pp 1–6, 2015). This stand-in infrastructure is essential for sharing rescue-related information to the on-field rescue hubs and collecting real-time information from the devastating site to deliver to the outside world. Moreover, in such scenarios, it is possible that the Device-to-Device (D2D) nodes at the ground may have depleted battery power and hence are unable to transmit or receive information. In this paper, we propose a novel UAV-assisted multi-hop D2D communication model with energy harvesting for such a disaster scenario. In the proposed model, the best path from the UAV to the destination out of multiple D2D options is selected following a modified Dijkstra’s algorithm. We develop analytical expressions for the end-to-end outage probability, ergodic capacity, and throughput in the multi-hop D2D links for making communication possible in the disaster zone. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme and observe significant improvements in terms of various network attributes.