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When natural disasters strike, the coverage for Internet of Things (IoT) may be severely destroyed, due to the damaged communications infrastructure. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be exploited as flying base stations to provide emergency coverage for IoT, due to its mobility and flexibility. In this paper, we propose multiantenna transceiver design and multihop device-to-device (D2D) communication to guarantee the reliable transmission and extend the UAV coverage for IoT in disasters. First, multihop D2D links are established to extend the coverage of UAV emergency networks due to the constrained transmit power of the UAV. In particular, a shortest-path-routing algorithm is proposed to establish the D2D links rapidly with minimum nodes. The closed-form solutions for the number of hops and the outage probability are derived for the uplink and downlink. Second, the transceiver designs for the UAV uplink and downlink are studied to optimize the performance of UAV transmission. Due to the nonconvexity of the problem, they are first transformed into convex ones and then, low-complexity algorithms are proposed to solve them efficiently. Simulation results show the performance improvement in the throughput and outage probability by the proposed schemes for UAV wireless coverage of IoT in disasters.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.