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. 2026 Jan 2;21(1):e0337759.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0337759. eCollection 2026.

Energy-efficient framework based on optimal antenna selection in S-NOMA supported UAV IoT networks

Lav Soni  1 , Ashu Taneja  1 , Nayef Alqahtani  2 , Ali Alqahtani  3
Affiliations

Energy-efficient framework based on optimal antenna selection in S-NOMA supported UAV IoT networks

Lav Soni et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Owing to the high emissions and increased energy consumption of the expanding heterogeneous internet-of-things (IoT) devices across terrestial and non-terrestial networks, achieving the energy sustainability in future IoT networks is the main challenge. This paper presents an energy efficient framework utilising spatial non orthogonal multiple access (S-NOMA) technique in UAV assisted IoT networks. An antenna selection algorithm is proposed that selects a set of active antennas enabling user fairness. The numerical formulations for the air-to-ground communication links in the S-NOMA system is also obtained. Further, the paper proposes a power consumption model for the S-NOMA enabled network to carry out the energy efficiency analysis. The transmit power consumption, circuit power consumption and UAV hovering power is taken into account. The proposed S-NOMA framework with optimal antenna selection is evaluated against conventional NOMA and random schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that S-NOMA achieves superior performance in terms of data rate and energy efficiency. It is observed that at an SNR of 30 dB, the proposed method with achieves a data rate of 15.2 bps/Hz, outperforming conventional NOMA which achieves 6.4 bps/Hz. Also, the energy efficiency improves by 14.4% at transmit power P=25 dBm with the proposed antenna selection scheme over random selection scheme. This improvement is attributed to the enhanced spatial gain and power-aware antenna selection, thus resulting in sustainable UAV IoT networks.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. A communication model of UAV assisted IoT network serving diverse set of users.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Flowchart of edge node selection algorithm.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Data rate performance of NOMA and S-NOMA systems over different antenna configurations.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Average EE comparison of S-NOMA and conventional NOMA for different antenna selection schemes.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Comparison of system EE with different height of UAV over different transmit powers.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Comparison of EE for different power allocation factors.
Fig 7
Fig 7. Maximum mutual information over varying NT with random and proposed antenna selection.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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