This thesis can be viewed as two parts. The first part focuses on performance analysis of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. We investigate how the interference behaves in the outdoor mesh network operating at 60-GHz when block age and shadowing are present using the probability of collision as a metric, under both the protocol model and the physical model. In contrast with results reported in mmWave mesh networks at 60-GHz that advocates that interference has only a marginal effect, our results show that for a short-range link of 100 m, the collision probability gets considerably larger (beyond 0.1) at the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of interest (for example, the reference value is chosen as 15 dB for uncoded quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)). Compensation or compromise should be made in order to maintain a low probability of collision, either by reducing transmitter node density which is to the detriment of the network connectivity, or by switching to a compact linear antenna array with more at-top elements, which places more stringent requirements in device integration techniques. The second part of this thesis focuses on finding the optimal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment in the sense that it can maximize over specific network connectivity. We have introduced a connectivity measure based on the commonly used network connectivity metric, which is refered to as global soft connectivity. This measure can be easily extended to account for different propagation models, such as Rayleigh fading and Nakagami fading. It can also be modified to incorporate the link state probability and beam alignment errors in highly directional networks. As can be shown, under the line-of-sight (LOS) and Rayleigh fading assumptions, the optimization regarding the global soft connectivity can be expressed as a weighted sum of the square of link distances between the nodes within the network, namely the ground-to-ground links, the UAV-to-UAV links and the ground-to-UAV links. This can be shown to be a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) problem with non-convex constraints. We have also extended our global connectivity to other types of connectivity criteria: network k-section connectivity and k-connectivity. In all the three cases, we have proposed a heuristic and straightforward way of finding the suboptimal UAV locations. The simulation results have shown that all these methods can improve our network connectivity considerably, which can achieve a gain of up to 30% for a five UAV scenario.

Vehicle-related communications are a key application to be enabled by Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems. The communications enabled by the future Internet of Vehicles (IoV) that are connected to every wireless device are referred to as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. A major application of V2X communication systems will be to provide emergency warnings. This thesis evaluates Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) in terms of service quality and latency, and provides guidelines for design of cooperative LTE-DSRC systems for V2X communications. An extensive simulation analysis shows that (1) the number of users in need of warning has an effect on latency, and more so for LTE than for DSRC, (2) the DSRC priority parameter has an impact on the latency, and (3) wider system bandwidths and smaller cell sizes reduce latency for LTE. The end-to-end latency of LTE can be as high as 1.3 s, whereas the DSRC latency is below 15 ms for up to 250 users. Also, improving performance of systems is as much as important as studying about latency. One method to improving performance is using a better suitable antenna for physical communication. The mobility of vehicles results in a highly variable propagation channel that complicates communication. Use of a smart, steerable antenna can be one solution. The most commonly used antennas for vehicular communication are omnidirectional. Such antennas have consistent performance over all angles in the horizontal plane; however, rapidly steerable directional antennas should perform better in a dynamic propagation environment. A linear array antenna can perform dynamical appropriate azimuth pattern by having different weights of each element. The later section includes (1) identifying beam pattern parameters based on locations of a vehicular transmitter and fixed receivers and (2) an approach to find weights of each element of linear array antenna. Through the simulations with our approach and realistic scenarios, the desired array pattern can be achieved and array element weights can be calculated for the desired beam pattern. Based on the simulation results, DSRC is preferred to use in the scenario which contains large number of users with setup of higher priority, and LTE is preferred to use with wider bandwidth and smaller cell size. Also, the approach to find the controllable array antenna can be developed to the actual implementation of hardware with USRP. / Master of Science