Age of Information in Uplink Cellular-Connected UAV Networks with Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Yanan Li, Jingkai Hou, Hongguang Sun, Hongming Zhang, Shuqin Li

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in various sensing applications, highlighting the need for efficient communication systems. Age of Information (AoI) is a critical metric to assess the timeliness of information in wireless networks. As a promising architecture, cellular-connected UAV network has been widely discussed in both academia and industry. However, the AoI in uplink cellular-connected UAV networks has not been fully investigated. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose an analytical framework to evaluate the AoI performance of uplink cellular-connected UAV network by considering the practical Nakagami-m fading channels. By leveraging stochastic geometry, we first derive the negative integer b th moments of uplink conditional success probability of the typical UAV, which is further used to derive the analytical expressions for average AoI and the variance of AoI. The analytical results provide insight and trade-offs for optimizing AoI in the network under consideration.