In this paper, we study a multi-hop communication system of tethered multi-rotor UAV low altitude emergency communication platform, where the UAV acts as the air MBSs and MRs and
M1 UAVs are deployed in a given geographical area within a given limited duration
T to serve collaboratively a group of
K1 Gus at altitude
h. Each UAV is equipped with a micro base station to provide communication coverage for GUs within the circle of the maximum coverage radius
in
Figure 1, where the radius of GUs in polar coordinates is
and the angle is
. If the UAV is static, it hovers over the center of the circular coverage area; if the UAV is mobile, it circles over the circular coverage area with radius
and angle
, and flies in one direction at its maximum speed
V. The multi UAV collaborative communication system equipped with dual antennas adopts a 2.4GHz microwave communication frequency band and space-time block coding (STBC). Assuming using
-base modulation, each
m bits first in the binary information bit stream transmitted by the information source are divided into a group, and two consecutive sets of bits are modulated and mapped, that is, each set of bits is mapped to a modulating symbol on the constellation diagram. Therefore, we obtain two modulation signals
and
, and encoding method as the following:
where X is the encoding matrix and
represents the complex conjugate of
.
UAVs and GUs constitute a multi-source multi-destination multi-hop relaying, as shown in
Figure 1, where assuming that GU
i as the source node or the destination node, GU
j acts as the destination node or source node according to the communication direction, while the UAV
m and UAV
m+1 act as relays in both directions, and the center of the circular coverage area of UAV
m is the origin of the coordinate system. The coordinates for the GU
i and GU
j are
and
respectively. For static UAV, the coordinates for the UAV
m and UAV
m+1 are
and
respectively. For mobile UAV, the coordinates for the UAV
m and UAV
m+1 are
and
respectively, where
and
is the angle between the UAV and the X axis. Using CC, UAV
mdemodulates and decodes the information sent by GU
i, then encodes the channel and forwards it to the UAV
m+1. UAV
m+1 demodulates and decodes the received information, then encodes the channel and then forwards it to GU
j. The communication link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is as follows:
where
is the channel fading coefficient,
is the noise variance, and the power loss
satisfies
, while
, 𝑛=1, 𝑛=2, and 𝑛=3 correspond to the uplink, AtA, and downlink conditions, respectively. Assuming that the AtG communication links are Nakagami-
k fading channels,
, the PDF of
as the following:
where
,
is the Gamma function,
is the shape parameter of Nakagami fading and indicates the severity of fading,
is the average fading powers. Using (8) and (9), the PDF of
obeying gamma distribution are as follows:
where
is shape parameter,
is scale parameter. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of
can be derived as:
where
is the incomplete Gamma function. By averaging instantaneous BER of the joint PDF of the link SNR
,
and
, the total BER can be obtained as:
where
, while
and
.