A Networking Framework for Multiple-Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicles in FANETs

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) cooperation scenario has gained a great amount of interests because it is possible to support various scenarios based on their different characteristics of unmanned vehicle systems. For this purpose, in this paper, we develop the networking framework for Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs), where heterogeneous multiple unmanned vehicles conduct ground-air cooperative missions. To support this scenario, communication path should be maintained among UAVs, UGVs and ground control station, therefore guaranteeing a reliable ad hoc network is an important issue. Regarding this, we provide development of flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) routing protocol and unmanned vehicle-based testbed environments which can be used for the experimentation for the developed routing protocol in which they consist of ground control station (GCS), multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicle system, network topology monitor, and FANET communication modem.