RSMA-Enabled Hierarchical UAV Networks with Non-Linear Energy Harvesting: Outage Probability Analysis and UAV Placement Optimization
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, cilt.75, sa.10, ss.23528-23545, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 75 Sayı: 10
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1109/tvt.2026.3701715
- Dergi Adı: IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Aerospace Database, Compendex, INSPEC, Materials Science & Engineering Collection (ProQuest), Technology Collection (ProQuest)
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.23528-23545
- Anahtar Kelimeler: 6G, energy harvesting, outage probability, RSMA, UAVs
- Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to enhance connectivity, extend network coverage, and support advanced communication services in sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks, particularly in public and civil applications. Although multi-UAV systems offer greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness than single-UAV deployments, their implementation still faces several fundamental challenges that limit their reliability, sustainability, and scalability. The limited onboard energy restricts mission duration and communication continuity. Therefore, wireless energy harvesting (EH) emerges as a promising solution to overcome this limitation. However, terrestrial energy sources experience path loss, making EH from surrounding UAVs more sustainable. Moreover, rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) remains insufficiently explored in hierarchical UAV networks under hardware impairments (HWI) and imperfect channel state information (ICSI). This paper proposes a hierarchical ad hoc UAV network with non-linear EH and RSMA to enhance both energy and cost efficiency, where UAVs harvest energy from surrounding UAVs. For a practical scenario, we consider the effect of HWI and ICSI in our proposed system. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to investigate such a scenario in the literature. The outage probability expressions for ground Internet of things (IoT) devices, each CMU, and the overall outage probability of the proposed system are derived over Nakagami-m fading channels while considering practical constraints such as HWI, ICSI, and non-linear EH. Additionally, approximate outage probability expressions are derived for high transmit power regimes. Subsequently, we formulate two optimization problems to enhance reliability and performance. The first jointly optimizes ground IoT device pairing and CMU selection to minimize overall outage probability. The second determines the optimal CMU hovering position and EH factor. Our findings indicate that the proposed system outperforms all benchmarks in terms of outage probability.