Abstract
In recent years, FANET-related research and development has doubled, due to the increased demands of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian operations. Equipped with more capabilities and unique characteristics, FANET is able to play a vital role in mission-critical applications. However, these distinctive features enforce a series of guidelines to be considered for its efficient deployment. Particularly, the use of FANET for on-time data communication services presents demanding challenges in terms of energy efficiency and quality of service (QoS). Proper use of communication architecture and wireless technology will assist to solve these challenges. Therefore, in this paper, we review different communication architectures, including the existing wireless technologies, in order to provide seamless wireless connectivity. Based on the discussions, we conclude that a multi-layer UAV ad-hoc network is the most suitable architecture for networking a group of heterogeneous UAVs, while Bluetooth 5 (802.15.1) is the most favored option because of its low-cost, low power consumption, and longer transmission range for FANET. However, 802.15.1 has the limitation of a lower data rate as compared to Wi-Fi (802.11). Therefore, we propose a hybrid wireless communication scheme so as to utilize the features of the high data transmission rate of 802.11 and the low-power consumption of 802.15.1. The proposed scheme significantly reduces communication cost and improves the network performance in terms of throughput and delay. Further, simulation results using the Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET) further support the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Highlights
During the past couple of years, providing access anytime and anywhere to network resources has become an important challenge for FANET
Simulation were carried out for two different scenarios in order to emulate a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under both reference point group mobility (RPGM) and random waypoint (RWP)
An apparent outcome is the emergence of new possibilities in the form of rapid, efficient, and low-cost deployment of future flying ad-hoc networks
Summary
During the past couple of years, providing access anytime and anywhere to network resources has become an important challenge for FANET. Drones 2019, 3, 16 collapses and where it is difficult to install communication infrastructure in a short amount of time These on-demand short-range wireless technologies can be used to provide deployable and reconfigurable communication services for connecting UAVs with rescue teams on the ground. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents various communication architectures for networking of UAVs with a discussion on the pros and cons; Section 3 elaborates existing communication technologies to address the communication needs of FANET; Section 4 details resource management and energy efficiency; Section 5 describes the proposed hybrid communication scheme; Section 6 presents our Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET) simulation setup and performance metrics; Section 7 contains results and analysis; Section 8 concludes the work
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