Synergetic UAV-RIS Communication with Highly Directional Transmission

Abstract: The effective integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in future wireless communication systems depends on the conscious use of their limited energy, which constrains their flight time. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can be used in combination with UAVs with the aim to improve the communication performance without increasing complexity at the UAV side. In this paper, we propose a synergetic UAV RIS communication system, utilizing a UAV with a highly directional antenna aiming to the RIS. The proposed scenario can be applied in all air-to-ground RIS-assisted networks and numerical results illustrate that it is superior from the cases where the UAV utilizes either an omnidirectional antenna or a highly directional antenna aiming towards the ground node.