Performance Evaluation of Amplify-and-Forward UAV Relay in Millimeter-Wave

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as a base station (gNB) is becoming a viable option for providing 5G services, both on-demand and on regular basis. On the other hand, due to the abundant availability of bandwidth in the mmWave band, which is part of the 5G frequency RF plan, there is an immense potential to utilize this band for next-generation radio systems. The goal of this paper is to investigate and evaluate the use of mmWave in access and backhaul communication links simultaneously using an Amplify-and-Forward relay deployed on the UAV. We first formulate the required mathematical framework for calculating the performance of the proposed mmWaveUAV architectures. Then, we conduct extensive simulations using ray-tracing method for different urban scenarios. Our results demonstrate the advantages and limitations of using the proposed architecture while providing a set of optimal parameters to be used in different urban scenarios which demonstrates the impact of the environment and the placement of communication nodes in the UAV-aided-5G network.