On the Performance of the UAV RIS-Assisted Dual-Hop PLC-RF Systems

In this work, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted dual-hop power line communication and radio frequency (PLC-RF) system, in which a UAV-based RIS (URIS) located in the sky forwards signals from the relay to the terrestrial user. More specifically, we assume that the PLC channel suffers from a log-normal distribution, and the URIS-assisted RF link follows the Rician distribution. With the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying models, the closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average bit-error-rate are derived. In addition, by taking into account the hardware impairments, the outage probability of the non-ideal hardware system is derived. Finally, the Monte Carlo simulation verifies the analytical results, which demonstrates the effect of impulsive noise and the number of the reflecting surface units on the system performance.