Performance Analysis and Optimization Design of AAV-Assisted Vehicle Platooning in NOMA-Enhanced Internet of Vehicles

This paper investigates the integration of the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique and autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) in Internet of Vehicles (IoV), aiming to provide flexible access and improve communication coverage for vehicle platooning. The goal is to accurately analyze performance and reasonably optimize network design for AAV-assisted vehicle platooning in NOMA-enhanced IoV. To achieve this, an analytical solution is derived for the average achievable rate from the lead vehicle to follower vehicles over Rician fading channels. Leveraging this analytical solution, the Gauss-Chebyshev integration is employed to obtain the approximate solution. Then, we formulate a problem of maximizing the sum of secure rates by optimizing the trajectory and spectrum allocation. The formulated problem is constrained by the security requirement and imperfect channel state information. Addressing the NP-hard nature of this problem, an iterative optimization algorithm is developed, incorporating Q-learning and the graph theory to alternately adjust the trajectory and spectrum allocation. Finally, the simulation results show that the approximate solution matches well with the analytical solution, and the gap is less than 6%. Moreover, the proposed scheme has a significant performance improvement in the sum of secure rates compared with the state-of-the-art schemes.