A novel multi‐hop routing structure for throughput maximization in unmanned aerial vehicle assisted flying ad‐hoc networks

Abstract

AbstractUnmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided wireless communication has many potential uses to improve connectivity in the harsh environments due to its high mobility and flexible deployment. To extend the coverage, multi‐hop communication with multiple UAVs as relays has become the prominent scheme in today's wireless network. In this article, we investigate the problem of generating a multi‐hop routing structure for data transmission to maximize the overall network throughput of a flying ad‐hoc network using UAVs. Specifically, we propose an optimization problem to jointly select a communication link and its transmission power so that the overall network throughput for a given total power budget is maximized. The problem is nonconvex over selected metrics, thus making it an NP‐hard problem. Without loss of generality, we consider the Dijkstra‐based shortest‐path tree as a routing structure, thereby converting the original problem into a solvable convex problem over the transmission link metric. We observe Dijkstra‐based routing is not optimal in our scenario, thus we propose a low complexity link swap approach to further improve the network throughput by exchanging appropriate child‐parent links of UAVs. Results are numerically validated, and optimal design insights are provided.