Performance evaluation of RIS mounted UAV communication system with RF energy harvesting

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can provide ubiquitous deployment services in areas with limited communication infrastructure, especially for the Internet of Things and wireless sensor network applications. However, the onboard energy capacity of the UAVs and the sensor module in IoT/WSN networks poses a significant limitation on the system performance. This paper introduces a comprehensive theoretical model to evaluate the performance of a combined RIS-UAV system, equipped with energy harvesting capabilities for a ground-to-UAV uplink communication system. The proposed system consists of a wireless device (WD), a single antenna power station (PS), and a RIS-fitted UAV that functions as a data collector for the WD. For the underlying system, we assume that both UAV and the WD, are energy-limited, hence both devices first harvest energy from the radio-frequency signal supplied by PS, before data transfer/data collection operations. A unified mathematical expression is developed concerning outage probability , effective throughput, and average bit error rate performance over a generalized $$\kappa -\mu $$ κ - μ shadowed fading channels. In addition, we also present an asymptotic analysis under a high signal-to-noise ratio assumption to gain a better understanding of the system behavior. The analytical simulation results reveal that RIS-enabled UAV wireless communication significantly enhances the overall system performance compared to conventional UAV-only data collection networks.