An effective data routing for dynamic area coverage using multidrone network

Abstract

AbstractDrones equipped with visual sensors are extensively utilized in various area coverage applications such as area mapping, monitoring of crops and road traffic, rescue operations, and so on. To enhance the coverage process, a suitable mobility model and an effective way of data communication are required. In literature, many works have been performed by focusing on the above‐mentioned aspects individually. However, unwanted information processing and a less packet delivery ratio with high message flooding are some shortcomings that have been seen in existing works on mobility model and routing protocol respectively. The above‐mentioned issues motivate us to propose a three‐level working process of ground area coverage, which includes the design of a mobility model as well as a routing mechanism incorporating the above‐mentioned mobility pattern. A set of waypoints for the movement of a drone is generated by an optimized aerial decomposition process in order to maximize and minimize the actual and exterior ground area coverage respectively. The decomposition is performed by incorporating the position and orientation of the camera footprint. While moving through the waypoints, a drone finds a stable and energy‐enable path to transmit the collected information to other drones. To avoid the frequent link loss due to the high mobility and limited energy of drones, threshold values for the velocity and energy with an estimated link stability time are considered as three parametric for the proposed routing mechanism. The result shows that the proposed work outperforms the existing result in many folds, and is suitable for the area coverage applications.