Analysis on the Performance of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Dual-Hop Emergency Wireless Communication Systems under the Jamming of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper investigates dual-hop Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) wireless communication systems with malicious jamming, where the destination node faces jamming from a malicious jammer with a RIS-Equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) relay. We model the channel gains for Tx-RIS and Jammer-RIS links with a Rician distribution, while the RIS-Rx link follows a Nakagami-m distribution, and the jamming status is modeled as a Bernoulli-distributed random variable. We derived and provided closed-form expressions for the probability density functions (PDFs) of the legitimate channel and jamming channel in RIS-Equipped UAV wireless communication systems. Additionally, a new closed-form expression for the PDF of the received signal-to-jamming ratio (SJR) is derived. Using the Gauss–Laguerre Approximation method, we calculate the Average Bit Error Rate (ABER) under Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) schemes. We analyze the effects of jamming probability, the location of the legitimate RIS, and different channel conditions on ABER performance through theoretical analyses and simulation results. Our theoretical analyses and simulation results indicate that an increase in the probability of malicious jamming significantly raises the ABER. For example, under favorable channel conditions, the ABER for BPSK modulation was observed to be as low as 10−5, whereas under poor channel conditions, the ABER increased to 10−2. Additionally, by reducing the distance between the transmitter and the RIS, the ABER can be improved. The legitimate RIS performs better when closer to the transmitter. These findings highlight the critical impact of channel conditions and the deployment of the RIS on the overall system’s performance. Our results offer valuable insights into designing and evaluating the performance of RIS-Equipped UAV wireless communication systems in the presence of malicious jamming, aiding in the development of countermeasures to enhance system resilience and security. The derived expressions are validated through Monte Carlo simulations.