Adaptive MAC protocol for UAV communication networks using directional antennas

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been used recently a lot in military applications as well as in civilian. It shows great advantages and importance in the search and rescue, real-time surveillance, reconnaissance operations, traffic monitoring, hazardous site inspection and range extension. Moreover, UAVs are suited for situations that are too dangerous for direct human monitoring. In general, UAVs have the potential to create an ad-hoc network and greatly reduce the hops from source to destination. However, the type of the mission and the capability of the UAV which are determined by its shape and construction causes a lot of networking issues. Most UAVs used in communication networks assumed the use of omni-directional antenna. In this paper, we considered a collection of UAVs that communicate through a wireless link as a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) using directional antenna. This technique offers tremendous advantages over that of using omni-directional antenna, although it requires an adaptive medium access control (MAC) to adapt the new antenna system as well as the constraint imposed by the UAV. To be more specific, we introduced a new mechanism that is called target information table to work with our new scheme during the switch from omni-directional to directional antenna. We made a comparison between the two techniques using optimized network engineering tool (OPNET). Our results show good improvement for end-to-end delay as well as throughput.