Executive Summary : | This project aims to enhance the performance of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) by improvising on the energy efficiency(EE) capability of UAV with the aid of Intelligent Reflecting Surface(IRS) and, to assess and analyse the performance parameters to provide practical recommendations for optimum energy efficient performance of UAV. An Intelligent Reflecting Surface(IRS) aided Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will be considered which can intelligently reconfigure the physical environment thereby bypassing obstacles and enhancing spectral efficiency and reliability in UAV communication systems. An IRS comprises an array of re-configurable 'unit' passive elements, each of which can independently change the incident signal by varying the phase, amplitude, or polarization of the signal and can allow the signal to reflect towards intended receiver and thus save power from the mobile devices. Towards this end, an analytical study will be carried out to identify methods to maximize the energy efficiency and sum rate which leads to a new joint optimization framework. By applying machine learning approach, an efficient algorithm will be chosen to solve the formulated optimization problem to identify optimal values for the parameters such as IRS reflection coefficient and UAV transmission power allocation subject to the constrains on outage probability and transit power. The proposed project will explore IRS assisted UAV network to not only enhance spectral and energy efficiency but also minimize lost radiation in the surrounding environment of the existing terrestrial wireless communication systems, such as cellular networks and thereby achieving smart and re-configurable environment in future wireless networks. |